Good Girl, Bad Girl by Ann Girdharry

Good Girl, Bad Girl is the first in the Kal Medi series and tells of Kal, a photojournalist who is about to face an enemy she didn’t know she had.

Kal’s mother is missing and Kal is heartbroken that she didn’t take her mother’s request to come home sooner more seriously. As she begins to dive into the mystery, she finds that the training she received from her criminal father becomes more and more useful as threats she and her family have been receiving for years become pertinent once more. Kal lands up involved with a company called ScottBioTec that helps to fit children with artificial bio-enhanced limbs. But something doesn’t feel right. As Kal ropes her friends and sparring partners Marty and LeeMing into the case, she realises that corruption and immoral choices run not only higher up in different levels of society but also across continents. Kal is now fighting against the clock to save her mother who may have stumbled across this tragic secret, but also to save those innocents caught up in its evil web. Revenge is deep and can span many generations, but Kal will certainly give it her all to end the cycle now.

The idea of the book was appealing but ultimately it didn’t grab me enough. First and foremost because of the editing mistakes. I’m not sure which edition I received, but there were numerous errors from punctuation in the wrong places, to sentences being mixed up, straight instead of curly apostrophes being used as well as other mistakes. I find errors of this number just take away any pleasure in concentrating on the story as your mind is constantly having to readjust itself to understand the correct sentence structure. The whole “trained by her father” thing really set up parts of the book, but it never came into its own. I didn’t feel engaged in the fight sequences and her ability to heal so quickly was remarkable. Kal’s character was a little too good to be true and there was no actual connection to her. The ending of the book was tied up too quickly and when I thought there were still pages left in the book to read, they turned out to be excerpts of the next books, which was a bit of a letdown. The fast pace set in the beginning just fizzles out.

Overall not a bad book or start to the series but not one I would remember. In fact, in writing this review I had to go back and look up a few things as nothing really stood out to me. Not bad, but not memorable.

Thanks to Voracious Readers Only and the author for a copy of the book.