Review: The Murder Complex by Lindsay Cummings

Title: The Murder Complex (The Murder Complex #1)
Author: Lindsay Cummings 
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Release date: June 10th 2014
Source: Edelweiss
Format: eARC

Rating: 3.5/5

Buy on: Amazon | B&N | BookDepository

An action-packed, blood-soaked, futuristic debut thriller set in a world where the murder rate is higher than the birthrate. For fans of Moira Young’s Dust Lands series, La Femme Nikita, and the movie Hanna.

Meadow Woodson, a fifteen-year-old girl who has been trained by her father to fight, to kill, and to survive in any situation, lives with her family on a houseboat in Florida. The state is controlled by The Murder Complex, an organization that tracks the population with precision.

The plot starts to thicken when Meadow meets Zephyr James, who is—although he doesn’t know it—one of the MC’s programmed assassins. Is their meeting a coincidence? Destiny? Or part of a terrifying strategy? And will Zephyr keep Meadow from discovering the haunting truth about her family?

This is a dark and compelling debut novel by Lindsay Cummings.

The dystopian genre is one of my favorites and I still don´t get tired of reading it, and I sort of liked the idea of ​​The Murder Complex, which is quite dark, violent and bloody.

16 years old Meadow and lives in a walled city, that´s governed by the Initiative and where all citizens have their catalog number tattooed on their forehead, which allows the initiative to know all about them with the use of a code bar, also citizens have nanites in their blood which enables them to heal their wounds and diseases. But life in the Shallows is not easy, since the initiative controls and regulates all their food, their work and ideas and in addition to this the level of murder is very high, so there is some sort of imposed a curfew, but even with these nobody is safe. Meadow´s father has trained her all her life to survive in this dangerous world to be a survivor.

Meanwhile Zephyr is an orphan, whose work as the rest of the orphans is to be a ward, he works in the cleaning department, which is responsible for collecting all the bodies of the murder victims, clean the site and dispose of  the bodies.

By a twist of fate the lives of these two characters get intertwined and that's when the plot really begins, with the secrets and mysteries that begin to unfold and the truth behind the initiative and Zephyr´s himself, it starts to unfold gradually, until none of them knows who to trust.

The story is told from the point of view of Meadow and Zephyr, so we get to know both of them and their past.

Overall, The Murder Complex is a good start to a new series/trilogy, which takes place in a very dark, violent and intense world, with lots of action and an ending that hook me to read the next book.