"Game of Pawns" by Leonard D. Hilley II

From Goodreads: "Twelve execution style murders have occured in Newark, New Jersey, in less than a week. Each murder has a calling card- a red pawn on each corpse. Kat Gaddis and Lucian investigate the homicides and discover the last four victims were employed by GenTech, a company that recently merged with Mech Cybernetics. After FBI director Mike Carpenter shares evidence with Kat, they soon discover political ties and corruptions that place Kat's life in direct danger. New players emerge and what seems like serial murders suddenly becomes a struggle for biotech knowledge and power. Kat is thrust into their game-The Game of Pawns."

While I enjoyed this book immensely, I unfortunately did not enjoy it as much as the first two books in the "Predators" series, "Predators of Darkness: Aftermath" and "Beyond the Darkness". I felt like in this book the parallel plot lines surrounding each character did not come together as nicely as in the previous ones. I had a very difficult time trying to keep all of the characters (the majority of the characters being new or only briefly touched upon in the previous two books) in order, for instance Slayton, Denton, Matthews, Typhis, and Jensen.

Furthermore, I personally did not feel all that much of a connection to the more so new characters (ie. Joe and the gang) than the previous characters and I felt that the characters that I loved in the previous books weren't quite themselves in this one, they had almost, in a sense, lost themselves (ie. when Lucas was a mess over Lydia's kidnapping. I felt like in the previous books had this happened he would have remained calm allowing himself to have better control of the situation, when in reality he was, I hate to say, a blubbering mess and he tried to jump into rescuing her without a concrete plan and he had to be talked out of said plan by Joe or Dr. Helmsby. Wasn't he supposed to be smart? How could he fall in the same trap over and over again?)- save for the talking rats- I thought that they were an amazing addition to this series, they really brought forth the humor that was needed in this overall quite serious book and Typhis- I really did like him despite him being a kinda psycho. Typhis legitimately cared about his creations children and became emotionally attached to them unlike Idris ever did- for Typhis his experiments were much more meaningful than just he financial gain they presented.

Furthermore, in this book I loved how much the characters really knew one another, when the vast majority of the characters had heard that Lydia was kidnapped their first response was something along the lines of, "Lucas will do everything in his power to find her".

All in all, while this is not my most favourite book in this series it is by no means bad. It is still possesses one of the most original story lines I have ever read, let alone heard of, before and I really hope that in the (near) future Leonard gets all of the recognition that he deserves for being an amazing author!

Rating: 8.5/10

I received this book from the author to read and honestly review. I was not compensated in any way for said review.