Bounty Hunter (Bounty Hunter #1) – Rachel Aukes

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The world went down the crapper a long time ago. It all happened before Joe Ballast’s time, and he only cared about things that impacted him now, like who was going to try to shoot him next. . .

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This book took me by honest surprise, I don’t normally gravitate towards stories with guns and blasters, it has never been a concept that really grabbed my attention. But bounty hunters, mercenaries and the like, do grab my attention. So the premises of following a bounty hunter was all I needed. I went in to this read based on the title and cover alone, and I was not disappointed this a fun, fast paced, and action packed story.

Right from the start we are just thrown into the bounty hunter world of Joe Ballast, there is no wait or build up to him being a bounty hunter, this is a man who has been doing this job for some time now and that’s where we start his story at. When you met him you just know Joe is going to be that protagonist who just gets involved in other peoples business only for it to go sour, and he does not come up short on this aspect. The action is nonstop throughout this story, which makes for a compelling atmosphere, it pulls you in and makes you want more. Aside from Joe
the cast of characters do not come up short, there was honestly way more characters then I was expecting.

Through the story we met an array of characters from other bounty hunters, a town sheriff, to some adorable as heck kids, and everything else in between. The cast is large but well balanced, the story never loses its focus on Joe being our main leading man. (But I wont lie, Kit and Rex won my heart too.)

While I appreciated the large cast I will say one of the major things that bothered me was the conversations, specifically ones between the bounty hunters. These guys are suppose to be ex-military (some not all), rough, gruff, no nonsense, shoot first ask questions later kind of guys, but their conversations with each other felt like 13 year old boys bantering back and fourth, my mind pictures early to late 30ish for most of these guys, so the childish banter kind of killed that. Now I’m not saying they needed to be full of swears and nastiness but I mean a little rough language flavor would have sold me a bit more on their rough “personalities”, especially Rex, I had expected him to be a bit more on the fowl side with the way he is described.

The world-building was a lot smaller in comparison to the characters and plot, its a world in the distant future where a ton of wars just laid waste to the lands and now people struggle to get by in what is called the Wastelands. A few generations of people moved to living in silos under ground but have since moved back above ground. The world building is minimal but I do think that is do to the amount of work that was put into all the action, Joe didn’t have much time to stop and take in the flowers, if you know what I mean, but this did make it a bit hard at times to understand what possible location style I was suppose to envisioning in my mind. But then again its a wasteland so I guess there really isn’t much to describe or envision with that setting.

The only other thing that I wasn’t particularly fond of was the mutant story-line. That was so odd and felt so out of place, It just kind of snuck up and then it was gone. So unless this will be touched upon more in later books, right now, it just felt strange and left me confused.

I will be continuing this series, as I really like the characters, and frankly I am a nosy person when it comes to background stories, so a girl can only hope she will learn what happened in Westown!

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

*Review Originally posted to Goodreads*

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