Book Review: The Trusted by Michelle Medhat

I really wanted to like this one, but just never felt like I connected enough with any of the characters to care what was happening to them… (I feel like I’ve been starting a lot of reviews this way lately, and it’s starting to get depressing.) The promise of MI6, secret lives, and a supernatural threat drew me in, but the delivery lacked something significant for me…

The blurb made this one sound right up my alley – spies, weird stuff, secrets, good v. evil – but the delivery was awkward,the characters oddly flat, the story line convoluted and the supernatural stuff vague and ancillary (at least as far as I got – which is about half-way) and I never seemed to connect with any of it. There’s a cool core concept here, but the execution felt forced and didn’t flow smoothly. There are multiple story lines and traumatic events that happen like a hit-and-run, shifting narrative perspectives that flow in parallel but never seem to overlap in a way that explains anything, and numerous characters that dance in and out of the action with so much fluidity I felt like I needed a flow chart to keep track…

This one just didn’t work for me.

My review copy was provided by NetGalley.