Review: Sentinel by Matthew Dunn

 

The sequel to Spycatcher and I will be continuing my reading of this series. I won the fourth book years ago in a Goodreads giveaway win and when I was setting up my buzzword TBR for the year, I decided to put the fourth book on my TBR or I would have never picked it up. Reading the first book a couple months ago, I disliked it because the main character was so arrogant and cocky and he thought he was untouchable. 

I made the decision that if I didn't like this one, I would not continue with the series and just get rid of my copy of the fourth book. I ended up really liking this one. It takes place in Russia and the way to my bookish heart is Russian settings and spy/espionage plots. Will Cochran, the MC, has to stop a war between America and Russia before it is even begun. He has to team up with the first ever Spartan who's code name is Sentinel. His past comes up and they have to figure out how to stop the main antagonist to stop killing Russian agents and to not set off a nuclear bomb. 

This book was better than the first. Some of the arrogance and cockiness from Will in the first installment was toned down way more. He had more failures this time proving that he wasn't a one and done man. He met his match and was over powered several times which actually made him more human than "killing" machine. He once again fell for a woman and she died. 

The two things that annoyed me was that he talked about the smart suits the men were wearing and what kind of knot their ties were in and how their hair was styles either with creams or oils. Like how does that fit the story... IT DOESN'T! And I had to skim the end where he was climbing the moutian with ice axes and crampons. I was annoyed at the 2-3 pages of foot goes there, slamming the ice axe here, sweat making body cold, second ice axe going just above the first and repeat. It was stupid. 

The endings do need work. I will be picking up the third book next month in anticipation of reading the fourth book in September for the Buzzword reading challenge.