Circle of Assassins

Steven Rigolosi

Average Rating 8/10 (1 Review)

REVENGE IS SWEET!
Every day we are brutalized by those who hurt us, take advantage of us, steal what is ours, mistreat our loved ones, destroy our property, terrorize us psychologically, criticize and condemn us, or trample our self-respect. Enough is enough! It's time to turn the tables. Write to A care of Box 270. (For entertainment purposes only.)

Five desperate strangers answer an ad that promises to help them eliminate an unwanted person from their life. A criminal mastermind named “A” makes each of them a provocative offer: Murder a complete stranger chosen by a fellow assassin, and in return have a stranger murder your chosen target. How many will accept A’s offer to join the circle of assassins? Which of the killers will succeed in their plot? Who is A, and will he or she end up dead or alive?

Circle of Assassins will keep you reading late into the night as it twists and turns to its final shocking conclusion.

Review by Chrissi (170707) Rating (8/10)

Review by Chrissi
Rating 8/10
Righteous anger at events is something that we all feel when we read about how a person has been unfairly treated, when the victim seems to have had no redress or when an offender is not punished appropriately for their offence. So imagine if you will, that someone hurt you or yours and you had an opportunity to hit back without any chance of being caught; would you be tempted? I think that anyone would be tempted, but whether you acted on that impulse or not would depend on a lot of things, your temperament, whether you felt you had nothing to lose at that moment in time and whether you felt certain that you could get away with it.

Could you be tempted? Or would you have a fleeting thought of revenge and then file that sensation away, to be dealt with at a later date. What if, at the moment that you teetered, you came across a letter or an article which prompted you to act? We all do things on the spur of the moment, and in that moment, revenge looks and feels like such a fabulous thing that you act on that impulse.

Steven Rigolosi has taken these very human emotions and woven them into a really interesting thriller, each of his characters is sympathetically written and you can see why they would be tempted by such an offer. Each person responds to a letter designed to provoke an angered reaction, about how badly people have been treated, and we meet each of them and see how they are (not completely unwillingly) taken along a road to revenge.

The interesting thing is that each is not given the means to solving their own dilemma, but they take on the mantle of avenger for each other, safe in the knowledge that someone is taking on their own personal vendetta. Having got this far, there is no backing out, otherwise the circle will be broken.

The mastermind uses a series of blinds and double-blinds to ensure that no-one knows who is working on each others behalf and this ensures that there will be no link from the victim to the avenger. After all, what motive could a person have for doing ill unto someone whose path they have never crossed?

I’m not going to do the spoiler thing, suffice it to say that I found the prospect intriguing and I wanted some of the people to get away with it more than I did others. I really liked the deft plot twists that make this book work so well and I particularly liked the fillip at the end, because although we know that morally people should not benefit from such behaviour we sort of want them to really.

An excellent novel with a good idea very well executed… pardon the pun.
Chrissi (17th July 2007)