The Kill Order Review

I read this right before Where'd You Go, Bernadette and didn't love it. Last winter or spring I read The Maze Runner trilogy. I definitely reviewed all three books but I'm feeling a little too lazy to link to them right now.

This was not exactly the book I was expecting. At the end of The Death Cure (SPOILERS AHEAD), we learned that the surviving governments of the world ordered the Flare virus to be released into the general public because there were too many people and too few resources. And of course the virus went rogue and people went crazy but eventually Thomas and his fellow immune friends survived.

I thought The Kill Order would be about the scientists who made the virus or the government who gave the order. But instead the book followed Mark, a sixteen year old survivor of the original sun flares who was present when a government ship landed in his mountain settlement and started shooting people with darts carrying the virus.

He and his companions decide to head for a facility nearby where they assume they will get answers. Along the way they meet people who have already been affected by the Flare virus and who are crazy, like the Cranks from The Scorch Trial and The Death Cure. He is separated from the women of the group at one point. He sticks with Alec, a fifty something former military guy and his girlfriend Trina is left with Lana, a military woman and a young girl named DeeDee, who appears to be immune to the Flare. She is probably one of the earliest kids whose killzone was mapped to find a cure.

Mark also flashes back to where he was when the sun flares happened and how he and Trina, his neighbor, survived. The novel is intense and never slows down, but there's something juvenile about James Dashner's style of writing that puts me off. Every chapter ends on a cliffhanger and eventually that just isn't interesting anymore. Mark was a little too similar to Thomas for me and none of the other characters were well developed in my opinion.

If you liked The Maze Runner, you'll probably enjoy this, but it wasn't one of my favorites.

Buy it at amazon and Barnes and Noble.