By J.K. Kelly
323 pages – self-published on Amazon
After recently finishing watching Drive to Survive on Netflix, Deadly Driver popped up in my email. A work of fiction, based on a top-ranking Formula One driver, with murder, mystery, and intrigue? Well, the blurb had me wanting to read more.
I’m not going into plot spoilers but will give you enough to decide if it’s something you want to read. Bryce Winters is American-born, and a regular on the podium at many F1 races around the world. But since a book needs conflict, Bryce has a checkered past that has caught up with him. Just join the words ‘CIA’ and ‘puppet’ and you get the idea.
He can come across as too perfect a little too often for me, but he’s likable enough as a character. Naturally, his heart was broken some years ago, so he’s obviously not looking for true love, and I can neither confirm nor deny he finds it.
Deadly Driver moves at a reasonable pace, with many of the F1 race locations used in the book, and described in detail. I think for me, this was the hardest part of reading Deadly Driver; at times there’s just so much detail that doesn’t move the plot forward, instead it jolted me out of the story. Examples are things like a description of a historic site, down to the year, the builders, and many other details. It’s great to get some description to be able to picture the location in your mind, but often Deadly Driver goes too far and slows the story down needlessly.
That’s not to say the plot isn’t great or the characters static. There are some nice twists and turns along the way and a third of the way through something happened that I didn’t believe would, but there you go. It’s twists like that which I enjoy.
It’ll keep you reading to the end, that is for certain. I felt the ending was a little rushed for me, but it closed everything up nicely with a bow, and that’s always a win.