A hit woman’s work doesn’t stop for the holidays. As the advent calendar winds down, Paige slips into a palatial house, ignoring a blizzard of texts from her ex-husband. No surprise—Julian always gets maudlin this time of year. The real shock comes when the target is not alone. His young daughter is there too.
Risking the wrath of her organization, Paige retreats. There are some lines that, for personal reasons, she just won’t cross. But when she returns on Christmas Eve to finish the job, the girl is still there…along with someone even more startling. As the ghosts of her past gather—to haunt or to help, it’s unclear—Paige must confront old traumas and outwit her superiors to make it to Christmas morning alive.

Lisa Unger packed a whole movie’s worth of story into the seventy pages of ‘The Kill Clause’, a story about an assassin being pushed beyond her willingness to obey the people using her as a weapon. Much of it was a movie I felt I’d seen before, but it was still entertaining.

For me, the best part of the story was the backstory narrative of how Paige had been recruited when she was young, vulnerable, and alone, and then groomed to become an obedient assassin. It made her more human and explained her reluctance to follow the instructions that she’d been given. 

Much of the story was tense. The action sequences were engaging.

Although the events took place at Christmas, apart from adding some interesting emojis and a bit of pre-packaged pathos, the story didn’t make use of any seasonal themes or plot twists.

I felt the story was let down by the ending, which was perhaps the only part of the plot in which a Christmas miracle was performed. I didn’t believe the outcome, and that undermined my enjoyment of the story.