‘Her Name Is Knight‘ starts with an Author’s Note that reads:

“Please note this novel depicts issues of emotional, sexual, and physical abuse; parental death; human trafficking; and both physical and sexual violence. The descriptions of violence are vivid, and I have worked to approach these topics with the utmost sensitivity and respect; I wanted you to be aware in case any of the content is triggering. Please use the resources below if you need any support. One other thing:

This novel is about one fictional woman’s story, told concurrently during two different times of her life. During her childhood her story is in first person present tense so that you see the world and her journey through her eyes. As an adult, her story is in third person past tense to give you a panoramic view and scope of what this kick-ass assassin can do.”

I read it, shrugged and moved on. mostly because I wanted to be entertained by seeing “…what this kick-ass assassin can do”.

The opening chapter is labelled AFTER and features Nena as an experienced assassin on a mission to kill. It was slick, fast, loaded with violence and with nasty people doing nasty things. It showed me what Nena could do. The third-person account kept things at a distance that allowed me to watch the violence with a little dispassion. The action visuals were all in High Def but the emotional soundtrack was intentionally muted. Even so, there was enough reflection from Nena to show that she was suppressing her emotions by letting herself be Echo, a crucial member of a skilled team, rather than Nena Knight. I was impressed.

Things changed in Chapter Four, the first BEFORE chapter. It opens like this:

“Before I became Echo, before I was Nena, I was Aninyeh. And this is my story, my recounting.

Of who I was.

Of how I came to be.”

You can hear how sombre that is: confessional, regretful, unforgiving but unapologetic. I knew then that this was going to be a tougher read than I’d expected but it was well-written and I wanted to hear Aninyeh’s voice so I read on, visiting with with fourteen-year-old Aninyeh in her small village in Ghana, knowing that something bad was coming.

The next few chapters alternated between BEFORE and AFTER with each visit to BEFORE becoming darker and harder to take. The AFTER chapters were also not pain-free. There was no ‘Mission Impossible‘ gloss, just killers killing people that they’d never met but who seemed to deserve to die.

I set the book aside part way through Chapter 12, the fifth BEFORE chapter, when I realised that I should have given more weight to the trigger warnings in the Author’s Note. I’d selected ‘Her Name Is Knight‘ so I could distract myself with an entertaining thriller. Now I had waded through a brutal massacre and was about to read a graphic description of child rape. I could see that these things were not included gratuitously. I knew that the cruelty and violence being described were borrowed from reality ratherthan being a product of the author’s imagination. Even so, I didn’t want those images in my head.

So, to my own surprise, although the book was well-written, had an elegant stoytelling structure. a solid plot and a main character with depth and complexity, I set ‘Her Name Is Knight‘ aside.