Finished Exit Strategy by Kelley Armstrong. This is the first book in her series about hitwoman Nadia Stafford.

In this one, Nadia Stafford is a former cop who now runs a Canadian nature/wilderness lodge — and occasionally kills people for a mafia family to help ends meet. Nadia teams up with her hitman mentor, the mysterious Jack, to track down the Helter Skelter serial killer — who just happens to be a hitman gone bad. Jack and some other hitmen and women don’t want the word to get about about HK being a hitman, reasoning that it will be bad for business. A game of cat-and-mouse ensues, as Nadia and Jack track the killer, who soon starts tracking them …

This is a challenging review for me to write because for every one thing that I liked about the book, there were an equal number of things that I had quibbles with. For example, I really liked the characters of Nadia and Jack, but found other secondary characters like Quinn rather annoying. And I didn’t particularly care for the quasi love triangle between Nadia, Jack, and Quinn. (But this is probably just me — I don’t much care for love triangles in general).

The action scenes were pretty cool, especially the big finale at the end, but I thought that the plot dragged in places, and that Nadia and Jack could have deduced who the killer was much earlier on simply by following up on a suggestion. Nadia has a tragic past that makes her interesting, but Armstrong only skims the surface of what happened. I would have liked a flashback at the very least. And so on and so forth.

But in the end, it all comes down to this — I’m interested in reading more about Nadia. So thumbs up.

Up next: Catch of the Day by Kristan Higgins.

Books in my TBR pile: About 15.