Even though I loved Ellie Marney’s books featuring teenage FBI recruits, I was for whatever reason hesitant to check out her most recent and totally unrelated effort, The Kill Code. I’m sure a lot of that has to do with the fact that it takes place during the second World War.
Turns out I didn’t need to worry about that. Yes, a major focus of the book was on the war, but it was really melded several pivotal plot points together. The first was that Kit, our main protagonist, isn’t who she tells people she is. We, the audience, are let in on that secret at the very start of the book. The tenseness comes from how she can maintain this new, assumed identity from those she’s grown closest with. A couple other major plot points revolve around segregation and queerness. Though the whole thing that really brings these threads together is a serial killer whose main targets are government girls.
We don’t really spend too much time with other female-driven departments in this novel, as all of our main characters are codebreakers. From what I gathered in the book, along with real-life quotes used at the start of each chapter, a lot of what Marney describes in the book is true. It’s always crazy for me to think about how she writes about the east coast as if she’s from there, when in fact she’s in Australia. Marney just does a spectacular job.
I think what I liked most about this book was how Marney was able to make a murder book about the World War. History nerds will appreciate it, but I love it for what it actually is: a suspenseful murder mystery! Though this book has many intricacies, I really hope someone reads this book and decides to option it into a limited series or something. I think it’s very original and, if done correctly, could appeal to a pretty large audience. This book also features an extremely likeable cast of main characters. Even a lot of the secondary characters who are harder to pin down in my head were likeable. Having such strong and supportive leads made the stakes that much more interesting and important. As I said, there’s a lot of important ground covered here, and I think a show could flesh them out even more.
In any case, if you’re looking for a wholly original read, then give this a shot! It looks like Marney actually has quite an extensive bibliography, so I might just have to start checking out some of her older works.