Kill Night - Victor Methos - ★★★

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AUTHOR: Victor Methos
SERIES: We Could be Heroes, #5
GENRE: Short Story
PUBLICATION DATE: February 7, 2023
RATING: 3 stars.

In a Nutshell: A short story combining a psych thriller and a legal drama. Nicely written, but didn’t hit me as hard as I thought it would. Still, a decent finish to this Amazon story collection.


Plot Preview:
Nick Collins has just been handed his first client accused of murder, a welcome change from his typical civil case clientele. As he strives to find the truth, he discovers that the small town in which his client Ryan is imprisoned has its own way of doing things. Unless he finds some concrete proof about Ryan’s innocence, Ryan seems to have already been judged guilty. Can Nick save Ryan? Is Ryan truly innocent?


This is the fifth and final standalone story in the 'We Could be Heroes’ series, described on Amazon as “a darkly inquisitive collection of short stories that examines heroic intentions versus their real-life consequences.”

I enjoy psych thrillers (when well written) as well as legal dramas. So this story should have been a winner. But somehow, the swing in tempo and style resulted in a hodgepodge reading experience.

With a title like this, I didn't know what to expect. The series has consistently focussed on people being ‘heroes’ and the outcome of their heroism, not always positive. In that sense, this story was more or less as expected. No surprises to offer, at all. Moreover, the title ‘Kill Night’ isn’t exactly indicative of the whole story, just of the first chapter.

Chapter 1, which comes from Ryan’s third-person perspective, is a cracker! I picked up this story before bedtime, and when I reached the end of the first chapter, I regretted not having waited till morning. However, the next chapter shifted gears into Nick’s pov, and when I say ‘shifted gears’, I don’t mean just the change of character perspective but also the change of genre into drama mode and the alteration of tone from dark to general. This immediately dampened the high, and I actually went to sleep in between the story at about the midway mark. Imagine that! Just a 58-page story and I still couldn’t complete it in one go!

I wish the whole story had retained the creep vibe of the first chapter. But it shimmies through typical territory until it revs up the tempo in the climactic scenes and suddenly becomes an action thriller. As such, the overall result was confusing. What was the story trying to be?

What was most disappointing is that many of the interesting sequences happen off the page. The story answers just as much as needed, and either explains the rest through the future conversations or leaves it for us to guess. While there are no major incomplete threads to the narrative, I still felt like it could have done better in this respect, especially in regards to the big reveal.

Not to forget, the forced potential romance annoyed me – I always turn into the Grinch when I see romance in a non-romance work, even if it is limited to the setting up of a first date.

In short, definitely interesting but not memorable. I might have enjoyed it better had it not been split across multiple and distinct writing moods.

I have seen good reviews of this author’s full-length works, but haven’t read any yet. Maybe this author writes novels much better than short stories. I hope to find out for sure some day!

This standalone story is a part of the “We Could Be Heroes” collection, and is currently available free to Amazon Prime subscribers.

Thus ends my tryst with the ‘We Could be Heroes’ series. Overall, it has been a good series for me. This was the lowest rated of the five stories, so no duds as such. Definitely recommend the series to short story lovers.

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