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.

Ehhhh. Just not my fave. I usually love Alex’s writing but this was disappointing. Predictable but yet hard to follow somehow. 2/5 stars

I love Alex Finlay's writing style and find myself ignoring all other duties when I pick of one of their books. What Have We Done was ingenious and as well-written as always.

I was so pumped and excited for this book but it didn't meet my expectations. It's not a horrible book but I definitely had hopes for it to be something that I couldn't put down. It didn't have the excitement that I crave for in the books that I read. I felt like it was slow and drawn out.

I’ve been waiting to write this review because I’m still wrapping my head around it. Alex Finlay has been an instant request for me, I’ve been a huge fan of the former books. Unfortunately, this one fell flat for me. It was so different than the other two books that if I didn’t know Alex wrote it, I would have never guessed. I will continue to be a huge fan as this can happen. I encourage everyone to give it a shot and make their own opinion!

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martins Press for the ARC of this novel!

It was a real bummer to not enjoy What Have We Done because I loved Alex Finlay's last book, Night Shift. I just didn't care about any of the characters and only finished it because I wanted to know what happened.

This is the third book of Alex Finlay’s that I have read and loved. They are nice fast paced thrillers that keep you guessing until the very end. I loved the story being told from multiple POVs, as well as flashbacks to when the main characters were teenagers living in a group home together.

I can’t wait to read what Alex Finlay puts out next. I’m sure it will be another amazing read!

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I'm a big fan of thrillers but in a lot of ways this one didn't really do it for me. I loved the alternating perspectives, and the overall premise of the story was intriguing enough. I did enjoy picking up the book and reading more, as it was very fast-paced, and I think we got enough breadcrumbs of info along the way. But I just found Finlay's writing to be a bit flat. It was entirely immersive, and the characters started to bleed together at the end. I was getting Donnie and Nico mixed up frequently in my head as I read. I may pick up another Finlay at one point, but I'm in no rush to do so.

I'm not sure why the summary only says three kids from Savior Home, because there were five of them! And the other two were just as important even if they didn't get POVs. Well, and of course one of them has been killed and it looks like the other four are targeted for the same. I loved the diverse backgrounds each of the characters and where they found themselves in the present. I would have loved more character development. But this book was plot heavy to keep the action moving. And it did move! Sometimes so fast I almost felt like it was tripping over itself. I think some of the many moving parts could have been trimmed back just a bit and still have been a crazy thrill ride, but it all still worked. Maybe all that action is what kept me from figuring it all out too early?

This one is told from the 3 POVs of former foster home children, now adults. We meet each of them when an attempt on their life is made and then follow them as they try and figure out what is going on. It almost felt like a spy thriller?

I loved all the twists and turns and I was on the edge of my seat as we neared the end!

This suspense/thriller novel throws everything including the kitchen sink into it, but still manages to work. Is the plot fully believable since it has all the things, no. Does it still hook you and make you want to know what the is going on, how did we get here, and how will this end, yes!

I'm a big fan of Alex Finley, who has written two of the best suspense novels I've ever read.

The book begins dramatically, with five teenagers who lived at a horrible home for children, Savior House, standing over a grave. Each one of them shot into the grave. But who was in it? Eventually, Savior House was closed, and the teenagers were moved to other living situations. Only a few of them stayed in touch.
Then many years later, some of the survivors began having fatal or near-fatal accidents. One is not suspicious, two is an odd coincidence, but three?

This one fell a little short for me because the characters and their relationships to each other were not explained near the beginning of the book. I kept searching for names and looking back to see if the person was mentioned earlier. After I figured out the character relationships and their histories, I enjoyed the book very much.

I never guessed who was behind the murders and attempted murders. It was a complete surprise.

Thanks to NetGalley, author Alex Finlay, and publisher St. Martin' s Press for an advance reader copy. It was my pleasure to voluntarily read and review this book.

This book was an interesting read for me. I really struggled to get into it at first, there were so many perspectives in the book that I had to put it down pretty frequently. But after a while I kind of got used to it. I never fully was invested in the book, the only character I kind of liked was Jenna. Everyone else was not very likeable.

Despite the two criticisms, I thought it had a solid plot. I just wish we could have gotten it from two people instead of five.

Overall I think it’s a very middle of the road book. The ending isn’t super predictable, but getting there can be hard.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this arc in an exchange for an honest review!

I have to be honest that I was slightly disappointed with this book. Alex Finlay is one of my favorite Thriller authors so I was jump at the chance to read his new books. I think the characters in this story just didn't work for me and the format of the story was jumping around a bit too much for my liking.

I still think, if you like thrillers or want to get into thrillers, you should check out Alex Finlay books!

What Have We Done was a really quick read filled with a ton of action and short chapters. I enjoyed both the past and present timelines and liked the main characters. Written from multiple perspectives that often switched really quickly, I thought that the main characters of Jenna, Nico and Donnie were unique though we didn't get too much character development as this book felt much more plot focused. I liked how we got a bit of each of their backgrounds and I liked the group home aspect that I thought made the plot unique. I found myself most invested in the first half of the story. So much happened in the book, which at times felt slightly unrealistic, but it kept my attention the whole time and was an engaging read. By the end of the book, I did have a hard time keeping track of some of the details, which was partly due to me reading this book over a two week period (thanks to a reading slump, and not because I wasn't enjoying it!).

Overall, I liked this one and rated it 3.5 stars. If you are looking for an action packed and plot driven mystery/thriller with multiple POVs and flashbacks to the past, check out What Have We Done, out now! This was my first book by Alex Finlay but I plan to check out more of his work.

Thank you to NetGalley, St.Martin's Press and Minotaur Books for the e-arc in exchange for an honest review.