Die for Me

March 23, 2020
Jennings’s third and final novel featuring sociopathic killer Oxana Vorontsova (aka Villanelle) and MI5 operative Eve Polastri (after 2019’s Killing Eve: No Tomorrow), a tie-in with the popular BBC America series Killing Eve, does nothing to make the evolution of Eve from faithful British agent and loving wife into the accomplice and lover of Villanelle remotely plausible. Eve and Villanelle are on the run from the Twelve, criminal masterminds in the James Bond villain mold and Villanelle’s former employers. After surviving travel in a shipping container going from England to St. Petersburg, Russia, they luck out by ending up in a warehouse protected by a gang leader, Dasha Kvariani, whom Villanelle knew in prison. Dasha agrees to get them new passports in exchange for carrying out a hit—Eve’s first but not last venture into deliberate murder, which, like her passion for Villanelle, is psychologically underdeveloped. Thriller fans will find nothing special about the plot twists as the pair try to stay out of the Twelve’s grasp. Anyone not already a fan of the TV show can safely take a pass.