Tuesday, August 16, 2022

Parabellum

 Parabellum

by Greg Hickey


Synopsis: A shooting at a Chicago beach leaves several dead and dozens injured. In the year before the attack, four individuals emerge as possible suspects.

An apathetic computer programmer.
An ex-college athlete with a history of head injuries.
An Army veteran turned Chicago cop.
A despondent high school student.

One of them is the shooter. Discover who and why.


Review: First off, thank you to the author, Greg Hickey, who generously gave me this book in return for a honest review. I appreciate it!

The story starts off on a beach along the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago at the scene of a horrific shooting spree. This is a difficult subject to read about in light of all the shootings that happened recently and I was disturbed enough to put the book down for a while. I picked it back up a month or so later to continue reading and skimmed past the prologue to get to the meat of the story where we meet 4 different characters-one of which is the shooter.

We get to know the 4 characters through pronouns and descriptors (ex-athlete, student, veteran, computer programmer) only. We never know their names and, to be honest, that threw me off as I didn't connect with the characters. But, perhaps, the point was for us not to connect to them because ultimately, should we connect with the shooter? But not connecting with characters makes it hard to become engaged in the book. I wish I knew the reason for not including the main character's names.

After many chapters, I finally became engaged in the book and really wanted to keep reading. You learn both backstories about each character and also what happens in the present day. At times it was difficult to keep track of what happened to which character in the past and not having names may have exacerbated my confusion. Part way through the book, I was able to eliminate 2 of the characters as the shooter (I would have been incredibly surprised if one of those 2 ended up being the shooter!). I did end up connecting with one of those characters and ended up rooting for that person to move on with his/her life (I'm not going to spoil it!) I suspected 2 of the other characters but I did sympathize with one of them more than the other. I could have seen one of them driven to a mass shooting but was hoping it was not that character.

Even after reading the whole story and reflecting on it, I'm not sure I understand why the character chose to shoot up random people at a beach. Even though I had predicted the right character as the shooter, I don't think I understand the motivations and I wish I understood more. Even though this book is long, the shooting seemed rushed. A lot of time was spent building the characters up but then all of a sudden the shooting is upon us and I didn't know what the trigger was for the shooter to commit this act.

The end was pretty heartbreaking when we meet the people who were at the beach by name and then read about them trying to flee the spraying bullets. That was definitely hard to read and frankly I skimmed it because it was just too realistic. Overall, I rated this book a 3. The beginning for me was 2 stars as I really had a hard time getting into it but once I got to know the characters, this book was 4 stars for me.

Thank you again to the author for giving me a copy of this book.

Rating: 3 stars