Book Review

Killing Eve: Codename Villanelle

Superior prose and a cracker jack plot lift this exceptional spy thriller and series launch from Jennings (Beauty Story). Assassin Oxana Vorontsova, who was once a linguistics student at the University of Perm, is employed by someone she knows only as Konstantin, who works for a secret international organization called the Twelve, a dozen men who decide which evildoers who threaten the stability of the world should die. Three years earlier, Konstantin rescued Oxana from the Dobryanka women’s remand center in the Ural Mountains, where she was serving time for murdering three gangsters. After a year of intensive training, Oxana now goes by the code name Villanelle. After carrying out several assigned killings, she guns down Russian political theorist Viktor Kedrin in London, which brings her to the attention of former British MI5 agent Eve Polastri, who was in charge of protecting Kedrin. Eve slowly begins putting together the pieces of the Villanelle puzzle. The wide-open ending points to more to come in the struggle between these two resourceful antagonists. Readers will eagerly await the sequel.

Killing Eve: No Tomorrow

Jennings’s pallid second thriller featuring British intelligence agent Eve Polastri and her arch-nemesis, Villanelle (after 2018’s Codename Villanelle), lacks the appeal of the BBC America TV series Killing Eve based on the earlier book. Eve once worked for MI5, where she identified a pattern to assassinations committed by a woman who had targeted “prominent figures in politics and organized crime.” Her efforts to prevent another murder were blocked by a superior, Dennis Cradle, and led to her dismissal. Eve finds a place with MI6, and tricks the traitorous Cradle into a meeting, where she offers him a deal in exchange for information about those who persuaded him to work for Russian interests. Cradle, with the help of Villanelle, turns the tables on Eve, setting off a predictable cat-and-mouse game. Eve gets on the trail of a shadowy Russian cabal, but the focus, again, is on her love-hate relationship with her rival. Anyone familiar with standard genre tropes, such as the spy’s significant other who demands a choice between work and family, will find them in droves. Still, many fans of the TV series will want to check this one out. Agent: Jason Bartholomew, BKS Agency (U.K.). 

Killing Eve: Die for Me

Jennings’s third and final novel featuring sociopathic killer Oxana Vorontsova (aka Villanelle) and MI5 operative Eve Polastri (after 2019’s Killing Eve: No Tomorrow), a tie-in with the popular BBC America series Killing Eve, does nothing to make the evolution of Eve from faithful British agent and loving wife into the accomplice and lover of Villanelle remotely plausible. Eve and Villanelle are on the run from the Twelve, criminal masterminds in the James Bond villain mold and Villanelle’s former employers. After surviving travel in a shipping container going from England to St. Petersburg, Russia, they luck out by ending up in a warehouse protected by a gang leader, Dasha Kvariani, whom Villanelle knew in prison. Dasha agrees to get them new passports in exchange for carrying out a hit—Eve’s first but not last venture into deliberate murder, which, like her passion for Villanelle, is psychologically underdeveloped. Thriller fans will find nothing special about the plot twists as the pair try to stay out of the Twelve’s grasp. Anyone not already a fan of the TV show can safely take a pass.