Although described as a 'Teen and Young Adult' book, I am much older than that but still found this book interesting, well written and compelling.  The subject matter is obviously depressing and perhaps not my favourite topic at the moment, but it was cleverly thought out and a 'good story'.  I had forgotten that this book was written by one of my son's favourite authors, and could easily have thought it was from one of my usual adult authors.  However, for a younger person it is still appropriate, although perhaps rather scary.  The end result for one of the main protagonists may not make it suitable for much younger readers, but I did think that brought more reality to the novel.

Killer T is set in a dystopian future where genetics can be altered and killer diseases can be easily created by anyone with some cash and some scientific know how.
The story was a bit slow in places but the characters were real, I wanted to be their friend. 
If you like the Pretties series by Scott Westerfield you will like this too.- Different but simular

Ebook provided by NetGalley for review. Thank you.

Read Nov 18

This book is confused. The blurb places a lot on a virus that kills 90% of people yet in the book this is all a minor event in the background. The main story follows Harry a wannabe journalist and Charlie who gets sent to juvvie for setting off a bomb that while she did make it, she didn’t plant it. The pair meet by chance and Harry falls hard.

We then follow the pair through their teens as they mature and eventually couple up. Charlie with her work in gene therapy was by far the most interesting character. Harry ended up kind of boring. The time jumps were annoying and always happened on a cliff-hanger. Overall this book could have gone so much further and just fell flat.

This was my first book by Robert Muchamore and I enjoyed it. It was a good concept for a story and worked well. I loved the setting for the story and how the relationship between Charlie and Harry slowly built.

Wasn't able to read and review before book was removed from e=reader



Harry and Charlie are teenagers whose lives are shaped by a society that's shifting around them. He is a lonely Brit in his first term at a Las Vegas high school. She is an unlikely friend, who gets accused of mixing a batch of explosives that blew up a football player.

The two of them are drawn together at a time when gene editing technology is starting to explode. With a lab in the garage anyone can beat cancer, enhance their brain to pass exams, or tweak a few genes for that year-round tan and perfect beach body. But in the wrong hands, cheap gene editing is the most deadly weapon in history. 

Killer T is a synthetic virus with a ninety per-cent mortality rate, and the terrorists who created it want a billion dollars before they'll release a vaccine.

I was very excited to read this book as it sounded right up my street, but I couldn't get on board with the way that Robert Muchamore writes about women. The descriptions seem completely sexist and gratuitous, focused on appearance and often in a derogatory way, and that really pulled away from the story for me.

This book blends a sci-fi theme with a dystopian future, focussed on gene mutation and the threat of a deadly virus.  It was certainly an interesting premise for a book - action-packed and really made me reflect on morality, ethics and the implications of gene splicing for the future! I did find the way the timeline jumped around a little disjointed and I didn't always love the writing style but the concept was good.

'Killer T' is populated by characters and situations that you'd find in the case files of one of Muchamore's CHERUB series, AKA the messed up human beings the secret agent teenagers go on missions to foil. In a way, I think this works well: Muchamore does excel at writing characters that fit the morally grey spectrum in a way that's uncomfortably close to real life. Frequently this means things like a narrator condoning his best friend cheating on his relationship, a secondary character throwing a narrator a life-line and then dumping them out to sea several years and parental figures who love their kid while also being judgemental and not present. I liked that part of this book. Muchamore is also great at playing into the fact that the universe is a messy and unfair place, driven a lot by chance and luck (both good and bad), as well as external factors beyond the narrator's control. 

The structure of the book was also appealing. It's told over a span of ten years, with the changeups of 'two years later' or 'five months later' being well-timed so as to come when you're at a part of the story that's about to become cringe-worthy, or even boring.  It means that Muchamore can show us things like one narrator's ughhhh-style relationship to show us where she's at, mentally and emotionally, without forcing us to witness the whole mess of it. Clippings from newspapers help ground each new change, and it is interesting to see the characters' through such different states of their lives. I would be interesting in another book told in this style.

Unfortunately, the time-jumps were not all well-placed, particularly in regards to the relationship between the two narrators, Harry and Charlie. By the end of part 1, they've met each other and had a total of about three conversations, which conclude with Harry being enamoured with Charlie and Charlie clearly hoping Harry will be a friend to her. By part 2 they're meant to be best friends, and Harry is now in love with Charlie, and also full of Entitled Male Bullshit that Charlie Should Be Into Him And Just Him because he buys her nice shit and was her friend when she didn't have any, even though he's never expressed romantic feelings for her, so she justifiably has no clue. Harry was going to be a dick no matter what due to this 'The FriendZone Is Real' nonsense, but if their friendship was actually shown growing and solidifying, there would have been something for the reader to get behind and root for. And there just wasn't. Really, their relationship didn't become even vaguely shippable until the penultimate part of the book, which is a real shame for something that's billed as an 'unsentimental love story'. Harry's entitled treatment towards Charlie sucked a lot of my enjoyment from this book. 

Overall, I liked Charlie's storylines and thought she was a compelling character, especially as she was older. She's ambitious, kind and smart as hell, and it's great seeing more science heroines. I think it would've been a better book if it'd been focused entirely on her, or gave her a male co-narrator/love interest who wasn't being toxic as hell at her. Overall, I liked the ending Muchamore wrote for her: I liked how neatly fate twisted around on her fortunes, and how successful she became, although I was Eyeroll otherwise.

The blurb was ill-matched to the book, as it wrongly suggests that Charlie and Harry's actions had any affect whatsoever on the release of Killer T, or that the story was about stopping the terrorists and containing Killer T, when it actually wasn't. Also, Killer T doesn't even introduced to the book until way past the half-way mark, so as far as titles go, it's also misleading.

Overall, would recommend Muchamore's CHERUB series over this.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC :)

Not what I was expecting- enjoyable, well-written, with enough twists and turns to make sure you don’t get complacent.

Near future dystopian YA thriller, with some innovative ideas about the pitfalls of easily available genetic engineering- you care about the main characters (in one case, probably too much).

I’d been so excited for the release of this book. It sounded like my perfect story. It’s true that the plot is perfect for me, unfortunately the narration didn’t fit and I really didn’t enjoy it at all.

This book unfortunately did not grip me and I did not finish it. Other readers may find it more appealing.

Killer T by Robert Muchamore (review copy from Bonnier Zaffre) was a frustrating read. It promised much, but failed to deliver.  

The novel opens with us meeting the teenaged Harry and Charlie in the wake of a bombing at Harry's school.  Charlie is framed for the bombing by a local crime boss.  Harry is an aspiring journalist who sees the bombing as the chance to cover a major story.  The two become friends, with Harry nurturing a major crush on Charlie.  The novel jumps through various episodes in their lives as they grow up.  Harry runs a successful local news website.  Charlie works in illegal gene-editing. Running in the background of the story is the growth of gene-editing technologies, and the way they are used to create viruses that wipe out large proportions of the population, leaving Harry and Charlie trying to make a living in the aftermath.  

The book is a bit of a mess.  It's never clear what the story is, beyond following Harry and Charlie.  And just as we reach anything resembling an exciting event or development where we could see the role Harry and Charlie play and how they respond to the world-shaping events going on around them, the author jumps us forward in time.  At best we get a bit of restrospective recall from them about how the events played out.  This distances the reader from the events of the book, with the bulk of the narrative focusing on slice-of-life type interactions.  

And the characters are horribly written, particularly the women.  Charlie is written as over-sexualised jailbait at the age of 13, and as an older teenager will sleep with the first boy to buy her booze.  Her sister is unrealistically selfish, narcissistic and evil.  Charlie's employer is a stereotype of a counter-culture person who becomes a boringly mainstream business owner and suburban mom.  Harry's aunt is a distant workaholic.  All of them are shallow and not very well formed.  It's a real shame.  

Disappointing.  

Goodreads rating: 1*

Killer T tells the story of Harry, a British teenager, newly moved to Las Vegas for further his Aunt’s culinary career. Keen to follow in the steps of his late mother as a journalist, Harry finds himself intertwined with the complicate existence of Charlie. A skilled explosive manufacture with a complicated home life, and the potential skills to keep them both alive when a genetic mutation threatens to wipe out life as we know it.

I want to start off by expressing that I requested this title as it <b>should</b> have been something I would really life, if not love. A YA dystopian (/speculative fiction) genre story with a focus on genetics and gene editing (an area I have some background degree study in). However unfortunately I really struggled with this story, and had assumed I wouldn’t ever finish it until I had a sudden determination to finish it off. And the fact I did ultimately return to the novel is one of the reasons I did not rate this even lower.

There was a lot of potential, but ultimately it fell down for me in that I didn’t really care for the main characters, which meant my foundations for investing in their story was not there and the majority of this story was focused in on the two leads. I struggled with the believability of their early relationship and the almost insta-love style infatuation. The start of the story felt really long, and I was honestly surprised to find out that this story was not a tome because the pacing seemed quite slow early on. However, it did start to pick up later – then the problem became that every time I felt I was starting to get a grip on the characters or a particularly plot point, we would have a time jump.  Some of which did not seem to make sense in their time of the amount of time which passed.

In some cases, the time jumps worked, both Harry and Charlie each had one time period that I began to warm to the character or take interest in their particular plot at that time. Some of the background characters that were introduced were interesting, I enjoyed Steve and Mango when they came into the story. I really hated the character of Brad, and felt uncomfortable with some of the writing around Charlie in this portion of the book. 

I think if there had been more of a focus on some of the later elements of the book (with maybe flashbacks to their younger years), I may have enjoyed the story more. I did also find some elements of this story strange for a Young Adult audience, there seemed a lot of violence, and the maturity of the characters later in the book I think may have played to a more mature audience. This story has made me curious to try something else by the author at a later time, as I feel that is may just be this particular story that I ultimately did not like. Potentially a different story by the author may work better for me.

Plot: Harry is a teenage journalist, trying to get by in his new move from the UK to the US, when an explosion, caused as we soon found out by Charlie, a younger girl, throws their lives into chaos. This friendship begins just as gene editing takes off. But alongside this comes the deadly virus Killer T – a result of terrorists getting their hands on synthetic gene editing material.

My thoughts: I’ve got to be honest, if I’d seen this book cover on the shelves, I never would have picked it up – it looks completely not my style at all. It was the mention of a killer synthetic virus that did it, a favourite topic of mine – I’m weird, I know. Personally I like plots where there’s an insight into what caused the virus (check!) and the world post-virus (check again!) so this one definitely appealed to me in those respects. I can’t say I didn’t like this book – it was good and kept me interested until the end. But I did find the pacing pretty slow, especially for such a thriller style plot, and the characters somewhat bland – or at least, they were fleshed out but didn’t quite feel relatable enough for me to enjoy them. The time jumps that often spanned years at a time often left me wanting more, but at least worked to cover a long time period where we see Charlie and Harry grow from confused children to adults trying to function in an unfamiliar world. It was interesting, but not a favourite.

This was a dystopian story which didn't really reach a conclusion. Based around two teenagers, living in an age where gene editing and manmade viruses are changing the world. I couldn't really relate to the characters or the storyline.

This wasn't quite what I was expecting from a Robert Muchamore novel.  As a teacher, I have seen many students reading his books - they told me that he often writes about the Secong World War, so I was surprised to find that this novel was actually about a dystopian future filled with genetically engineered diseases.  

The topic is an interesting one, and I think that 14-16 year olds would find it particularly thought-provoking.  I'd say that younger reader's would struggle with some of the scientific ideas, and I'd also shy away from recommending it to younger children due to rather explicit details about loss of virginity, sex and condoms.

This is a fast-paced novel with edgy characters and plenty of action.  It covers a timeframe of about eight years, but skips forward often to avoid any stagnant.  I can see why my teenage pupils enjoy Muchamore's books so much.

A coming-of-age story set against a dystopian future

In the near future, gene editing technology has advanced to the point where curing disease and tweaking your DNA to make yourself smarter, taller or better looking is more and more commonplace. Unfortunately, alongside this development comes the dark side of genetic modification - infectious viruses, mutated to be deadly, are manipulated by terrorists to be used as a weapon. Growing up amongst all this chaos are teenagers Harry and Charlie; him a lonely journalism-obsessed Brit in a Las Vegas school and her a feisty science geek who gets unfairly accused of mixing a batch of explosives and blowing up a school. As the pair are drawn together by the increasingly dangerous events around them, they find themselves fighting for their lives in a world that is falling apart.

Killer T was an extremely creative and unusual novel and not at all what I was expecting to encounter when I picked up the book. The plot is complex with plenty of unexpected twists and turns and includes a variety of genres such as action, science fiction, humour and romance. The story itself spans several years with time jumps in between the different parts, which was a clever way for the author to bypass the duller years of his characters' lives and also added a sense of progression to the plot. The world that Harry and Charlie inhabit is dark, gritty and harsh, and the story certainly doesn't shy away from addressing some pretty tough topics. Despite being fairly vast in scope, the conclusion ties together most of the loose ends and while not exactly a happy ending paints a more optimistic picture of the future than had previously been set up by earlier, bleaker sections of the story.

While the idea of gene editing in the future is not a totally new concept (indeed, I reviewed a book with a very similar concept earlier in the year), it is certainly an interesting one that seems to be a popular background setting for many YA novels. It is both fascinating and frightening to imagine a world where, for a small amount of money, people could edit their brains and bodies to make themselves superior to other people, and also wonder how far you might go if this became the norm. It would have been interesting to learn a bit more of the science behind it, but again this was probably left at a simple level due to the YA nature of the book.

Unfortunately, I did have a few issues with some aspects of this book that hindered my enjoyment of it slightly. I found that the time jumps gave the plot a little bit of a disjointed feel and at times made me feel that a story with such a vast scope may have worked better as a series. Entire years passed between the different sections wherein the characters changed significantly in their personalities, meaning that I never felt very connected with them personally. As well as this, the characters all felt a little bit one dimensional and the writing lacked emotion at times, meaning that even when very dramatic or shocking things happened, I didn't feel all that much reading them. This is potentially due to the story being aimed at younger readers, but the lack of emotional punch did negatively impact on my enjoyment of the book. Finally, I felt that some of the teenage interactions were written a bit simplistically and didn't feel as real to me as some other teenage characters I have read. Some readers might have issues with some of the young characters' more adult behaviours as well (drinking, sexual behaviours etc), although these parts were probably quite accurate to real life.

In conclusion, this was an entertaining read, and although it was aimed more at teenage readers, it still had a complex and engaging plot. I've read previous books by this author when I was younger, and I would certainly recommend this book to younger readers looking for an exciting and action-packed story with a difference.

Daenerys

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review

I enjoyed Killer T although not as much as I enjoyed the Cherub series. Futuristic, dystopian although some questionable descriptions of young female characters.

This book makes me feel so angry. This book over sexualises a thirteen year old girl and keeps referring to her appearance in a relatively negative way. This is aimed at teenagers, why is this still the way that women are treated in YA novels?? Why are some girls just described as "having cleavage"? That is not a description. Ugh, this book was just terrible.

Fast-paced with action from the very first page.  Typical Muchamore with tense situations, climaxes and mysteries.  Yet, it is also slightly different in that it is futuristic and we have lots things going on at once in this book - new school, new country, new friendships, terrorism, genetics, viruses... 
The characters are realistic with flaws and issues.