[Review] Memento Mori - Katy O'Dowd

Title of Book : Memento Mori
Author : Katy O’Dowd
Publisher : Untold Press

Take tea with the Victorian Mafia – organized crime has never been so civilized

Revenge is a dish best served cold. At the Lamb residence, it is also served on fine bone china.

The untimely demise of Thaddeus Lamb leaves his son Riley in charge of the vast Lamb empire, which imports tea, picks pockets, extorts, and keeps men warm on cold winter's nights. And so the Lambs grieve for their father in the best way they know how… Retribution.

Hired by the new head of the Fox Family, a position recently vacated by another untimely demise, the assassin O'Murtagh is tasked with the utter destruction of all the Lamb Family's business associates. They learn the hard way that there is no better hit man than a beautiful woman with tricks and weapons up her finely coiffed sleeves.

Treachery and deceit abound in the streets of London, and no one is safe. Honestly, it's enough to make anyone drink. Would you care for one lump or two?

I received a copy of this book in exchange of an honest review.

This is my first time reading a Steampunk novel so I was excited and didn’t really know what to expect. I don’t want to give away too much about the plot. You could totally read a glimpse of the plot from the summary at the beginning of this post. I think this book has a great concept. Basically, the main character is an assassin and she’s hired to assassinate a group of people who have a business connection with a –sort of- mafia family. So we have a girl, who’s trained to kill and full of deception, and also on a mission to murder a group of people, set in the Victorian Era London. Well, that’s something that I would want to read.

Anyway, I struggled a bit to get into the book. I don’t know why, probably because I’m not use to read this kind of genre. So I didn’t get the feel of this book in the first few chapters. The setting of this book is interesting though, at least for me. Memento Mori is set in London, Victorian Era London to be precise. Since this is a Steampunk book, there are cool gadgets mentioned in here.

There are a lot of things going on in this book in which I think the author could dig a little deeper on them. Some of the events could be expanded more and I think it would make the storyline more interesting. Maybe because of that, sometimes I feel like the story kind of jump suddenly  from one event to another. At one point I was like ‘wait what? What did just happen?’.

This book was entertaining, but I’m not satisfied with the ending. In my opinion, the ending doesn’t really conclude the story. I need more. I thought that there would be a sequel to this book, but then I found out that this is a standalone book. That’s why I gave it three out of five.