I need to give up on Finlay. His books are just not for me. I dislike his characters and his writing style is not my thing.

This was such an easy thriller to read. Overall I enjoyed the story, I thought it was entertaining and it had me hooked from the very beginning. I liked reading from each MC's POV, I thought it made the story much better knowing each perspective. Some of it was a little farfetched to me (the assassin, the twin murder chicks, you know) but I still liked it regardless.

Thank you St. Martin's Press/Minotaur Books for inviting me to read my first Alex Finlay, WHAT HAVE WE DONE!

I requested this book because I liked the author's last book Night Shift, but I learned too late this book is about youths with traumatic pasts and that is triggering for me. Also I reached out to the author (he follws me on Instagram) and didn't get a response so I lost interest. I want the book finally off my shelf so I'm leaving a review.

I truly couldn’t tell you what happened in this book. I binged it on audio in 24 hours while cleaning my apartment and it was fast-paced and “thrilling” but I just felt like it was trying to do too much. The amount of characters and the switching between past and present day within the same chapters made my head hurt a bit.

But take this review with a grain of salt because I didn’t love THE NIGHT SHIFT either (for many of the same reasons). I thought I would give Finlay’s books another try but probably just not for me 🤷🏻‍♀️

TLDR: this thriller fell into the trap of being too confusing and too many characters in order to get a good “twist”

Hmm. I do love a multiple POV book but it has to be done right and I'm just not sure this one worked? It just seemed like there was so much going on and I had to keep track of so so much that I forgot a lot that happened in the mean time. It almost felt a bit like the author was trying to distract me, which I get for this kind of book, but I do not want it to feel so intentional.. The pacing was just a bit off. Some moments I was totally engrossed, others I was just trying to muscle through. It was not bad by any means, I just needed a little bit more (or less) from it.

I’m sad to say I didn’t enjoy this! I absolutely loved The Night Shift, it was one of my favorite thrillers last year and I’m bummed this was such a miss for me.

This read like an action film — extremely fast paced with character backstory revealed in flashbacks over the entire book. There were a large number of characters that would reappear later in the book, and it was difficult for me to keep track of them all.

I felt some of the big reveal twists didn’t need to be withheld from the reader — it made the experience confusing and to me didn’t have the “big twist” intended impact… it just left me thinking, this could’ve been revealed a lot sooner.

I think this would make a great Netflix series or movie, but as a book I’m sad it didn’t work for me

Book: What Have We Done
Author: Alex Finlay
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Pages: 368
Genre: Mystery Thriller
A stay-at-home mom with a past.
A has-been rock star with a habit.
A reality TV producer with a debt.
Six kids meet in at the very misnamed Savior House, a group home for teens without parents. The place is a house of horrors with bullying and inappropriate adult caretaking. And girls go missing, never to be seen again.
Now one of them is dead and it seems an assassin is trying to kill the rest of them. These adults are going to have to dive back into their past to stop what is happening now. The narrative alternates between the three, with a few additional chapters thrown in from the killer point of view.
The book has a lot of action. While reading it, I imagined that I was watching a movie.

Alex Finlay has written some of my favorite thrillers of the past couple of years so I was curious to see what his latest had in store. Right from the start, it’s very different from his first two novels, leaning more in the action/thriller genres than your typical procedural mystery.

While the action starts immediately with assassins and shady organizations chasing Jenna, Donnie, and Nico, it takes a little longer for the mystery to unfold, which is another departure from his previous work. I was left with a few lingering questions at the end, but I largely enjoyed the reading experience.

Jenna’s chapters were my favorite as they felt a little more fleshed out and her action scenes made it hard to put down and added to the cinematic feel of the novel. As a bonus to any DC bookstagrammers who may read this, part of the story takes place in the city, providing a bonus activity of looking for all of the local landmarks mentioned throughout.

What Have We Done is out now. Thank you to NetGalley and Minotaur for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is not my first Alex Finlay novel, I have enjoyed his novels in the past. This one did not live up to the others I have read.

There is little character development even though they are shown as teenagers and adults. Some of the MCs seemed to add fluff rather than real substance. There are multiple POVs, but it is easy to keep track of what the current plot line is. The main focus is current events, with very little about the past. An expansion of the past would have helped to explain more of what was going on in the present. The past is the reason all MCs are connected, yet this potion was extremely skimmed over.

I was also disappointed that Agent Keller did not make a small appearance.

I want to thank Netgalley and St. Martin's Press, Minotaur Books for an ARC.

What Have We Done by Alex Finlay
4 Stars
I wish to thank Netgalley and St. Martin's Press for an eARC of this book. The strength of this book was the character development, the action scenes and the many twists as the book progressed. Five teenagers committed a terrible crime which would connect them for the rest of their lives. As adults now, with jobs and families, life becomes a whirlwind when they become targets of a killer looking for answers. I liked the short chapters, the alternating points of view and the very real action that propelled the story. I thought Jenna was an outstanding character that had as many moves as Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible, with an underground corporation to watch her back. Good story, Alex Finlay!

Alex Finlay knows how to write a solid thriller and he packed in the action and larger than life characters. While it was wholly unbelievable all the highly successful and/or famous people in the book came from one group home and friend group, I did find them all very interesting! The story was layered and kept me guessing and invested and I liked the rolling reveals scattered throughout.

With some suspension of disbelief, this really worked and I could absolutely see this becoming a tv show with the potential for spin offs as I loved finding out more about all the characters. Definitely a recommended read for something fast-paced and engaging!

A very interesting read! i highly recommend this tale for those that like drama. A group of kids that have all become fostered at Savior House. Young girls have gone missing. They form a bond and a deadly secret. Twenty five years have passed and they all have formed their lives. But now someone is trying to kill them, one by one. Follow the clues and survivors from failed death attempts. A great author!

Another thriller by Alex Finlay. Multiple POV with flashbacks from characters who share a past. These characters were very flawed (both good and bad!), but their development was minimal. Lots of action, some suspense, revenge and conspiracy. Good ending! Thank you Netgalley for the opportunity to read this ARC in exchange for an honest review. 3.5 Stars

What Have We Done was thrilling and twisty enough to hold my interest but I must say I enjoyed Every Last Fear more. Someone is hunting 5 adults that share a troubled past. Who will survive? You'll have to read it to find out.

Thanks NetGalley for an electronic ARC!

Alex Finlay's books are a hit or miss for me, and I must say this has been my least favorite of the three I've read by this author.

Let me start with the positives. I felt that the plot was pretty interesting. I truly enjoyed the setting and the world building in the story. Perhaps because I'm used to the area, it was very easy for me to imagine the cities in the story. I truly enjoyed the character development as well and found that their backstories truly offered a glimpse in why the characters were making certain choices as the story was revealed. I also liked how it was a book filled with action, and I truly enjoyed Jenna's backstory. It felt that her character was the most developed of all, and I really liked how her past experiences had shaped her life and make her such a strong woman. I was surprised by the twist toward the end which made the book worth it even thought it took me a while to finish it.

Unfortunately, I felt that the pace of the book was off. While there's a lot of action in the story, at some points I kept getting bored with the details that I assume were meant to build the story up. It felt repetitive and with no real reason that made sense. While the plot was somewhat unique, it also felt predictable. It's also not the type of book I'd read again because I cant even remember half of the plot already. Overall, I would say it's not a terrible book but not memorable either.

It felt like the balance between plot and characters wasn't quite there. This felt more like a James Patterson plot and I missed the character development from Finlay's other books.

If I were to give a title to Alex Finlay’s latest novel, I would not have chosen What Have We Done but rather the far more appropriate ‘What the Hell Happened?’ Part John Wick, part mystery, this adventure thriller tells the surprising story of a group of bad kids gone good and what happens when the past catches up with them.

It begins with a gun and a grave. It was justice – the only kind a group of weak teens could get against a powerful man who had the local police in his pocket. All five of them shot him so that no one person could take the blame but also so that no one was in a position to talk. It is a secret that all of them will have to take to their own graves.

Twenty-five years later, John – I mean Jenna – has retired from the mysterious High Table Corporation for whom she once worked and is a suburban step-mom. When she receives the message ordering her to assassinate someone, she is both too scared not to comply and too stunned not to just go through the motions and get herself out of this surreal situation. Until she looks through the rifle sight and realizes just who she has been asked to eliminate. Jenna deliberately misses, hoping this will warn the man she had been told to kill, and skedaddles. Then she begins the process of getting her family to safety so she can figure out just what is going on without worrying about them.

Meanwhile, Donnie is playing rock and roll on a cruise ship, drunk out of his mind, so he doesn’t have to face the failure his life has become. Once the star of a famous rock band, he’s now reduced to an unwanted extra in the group he himself helped to form. When he is fired after the show, he grabs a bottle and heads to the deck to look at the ocean. Being thrown overboard by an assailant he can’t even see seems a fitting end to the night – and his life.

It was meant to be a flash-in-the-pan show, a ‘reality’ piece to fill a gap in the network’s lineup. But The Miners, a look at life in the coal mines, turned into a surprise hit, and now Nico is stuck in West Virginia, allegedly producing the show but mostly corralling his erstwhile stars. When he gets a call from one of them asking to meet at the mine, he goes, expecting dirt on someone the guy’s got a beef with. Instead, he finds himself buried alive after a stranger sneaks in behind him and causes a cave-in.

Arty is riding high having gone from foster kid in a group home to tech billionaire. His life is seemingly perfect – until someone tries to assassinate him.

Then all four of them find out that Ben has been murdered. Is someone getting revenge for that night decades ago?

This is a dual timeline mystery where we uncover what happened twenty-five years ago that led five kids to kill someone and simultaneously unravel who is after them now. One of the problems in reviewing suspense stories is that the heart of the tale lies in the author’s ability to manipulate each puzzle piece to make us desperate to get to the next piece, and in order for each of us to have the same experience, one of us can’t tell the others what the pieces are. So I am not going to reveal much about the plot. I will say, however, that the author doesn’t take advantage of his premise to deliver a nuanced story. These five kids are far more successful than ninety percent of people and yet we don’t delve into why that is, except in the case of Donnie. They are also surprisingly unscathed by the past, again except for Donnie. They’re sketches rather than fully drawn although again, Donnie is the exception to that. This left me pretty much liking no one except – you guessed it – Donnie. Ambivalence towards the characters when you are reading a character-driven story is never a good sign.

Another detriment to my enjoyment was the complete ineptness of the villains. Four out of five of the characters survive the initial attempts on their lives, even though they’re are carried out by (alleged) professionals. I couldn’t believe – as in literally couldn’t accept – how inept the baddies are and how exceptionally lucky the heroes are.

Jenna highlights everything that is wrong with this narrative. She is constantly rolling her eyes and talking about how amateur the hits against them are and yet she falls into the would-be killers traps repeatedly. She was groomed as an assassin because of her gymnastic skills, and I struggled to buy that, too. If she had been a champion at Tae Kwon Do, Mixed Martial Arts, Judo, and/or Karate – pugilism of any kind – I could have accepted that, but gymnastics isn’t a training ground for fighting. Her reluctance to kill when the stakes are literally her own life and those of her family and friends infuriated me. I understand that she had left her previous life behind when she married, but given the danger the villains represented to her loved ones, I found her reluctance to put a permanent end to them confusing.

On the positive side, the prose is good, and the pacing is brisk. The characters are superficial, but that surface is attractive. The story is very entertaining, and that combined with the above made this a fast, easy read.

This leaves me with a conundrum. If What Have We Done was a movie, I would recommend it to fans of action-adventure films high on thrills and low on depth. There are books like that, too, and I would recommend this one to fans of those. But if you are looking for a mystery that echoes the brilliance of the author’s first two novels I would keep looking. This isn’t it.

What Have We Done is a fast paced thrill ride. I’m not sure I’ve read another book that had so much action. It was a fast read with a few twists but I wish I could have learned more about the characters. I found myself forgetting who was dead and who was alive.

This book was fantastic. It follows a few different storylines, my favorite of which was Jenna, that are connected through a shared foster home and a secret tragic event in their teens. They did something that was supposed to be a secret - no one was supposed to know - but someone does, and they want revenge.

I liked this book, but at some points it just got convoluted and crazy. I did like the twists and turns though so overall it got 3.5 stars bumped up to 4, and this is not the only Finlay book I've liked so I will definitely keep him on my reading list!

This book overall is entertaining!
It's fast paced and kept me interested throughout.
Jenna, a stepmom of two teenage daughters, Donnie, a B-list rockstar, and Nico, a reality tv producer, come under fire (iterally) when a hired killer tries to take them out. Gradually, secrets from their present lives and past align, linking them all to one big, buried secret.
My thanks to St. Martin's Press, Alex Finley and Netgalley.