I finally got around to reading this book in 2023 and from the very beginning, I felt it cut a little to the bone. Perhaps Robert Muchamore could see into the future?
The characters were an interesting duo and I think worked well together, the smart science kid and the future journalist trying to sniff out a scoop.
The jumping between timeframes threw me at times but you could see that it was needed for the story and moved the story along quickly. With everything that happened in the book; the introduction of genetics, labs, and humans messing with nature, it was nice to see it all come together at the end of the book.
Overall though, personally, this book wasn't for me and I struggled particularly with the theme.

I had heard of Muchamore from his much-beloved Cherub series, but I could never get into them. I thought I would try and give his new series a try, but again, I just couldn't click with it.

I will not be giving feedback on this book as I couldn’t really get into it but I think others may enjoy it.

Unfortunately this book was not for me, it was a bit slower than I would like and it just didn't hold my attention. I am sure other people will love it!

A good coming of age dystopian thriller that I think would appeal to fans of the enemy series by Charlie Higson.

Another Dystopian style book that I just didn't enjoy. Again the premise was there but I just couldn't get into it. I got bored halfway through and I think that it was because it was either too complex for me or I just didn't the premise of it at all. Its a shame as the blurb of this was definitely what I needed at the time but I just wasn't feeling it.

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*

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.