Tina Wingham’s The Reckoning of Jason is a gritty, unflinching plunge into the mind of a broken man teetering on the edge of sanity. At its heart, it’s a story about grief, violence, and the thin, blurred line between justice and vengeance. Jason, once a loving husband and father, is consumed by the death of his daughter and the collapse of his family. What begins as sorrow slowly rots into something darker. He becomes a hitman, dealing in blood and pain, until a contract forces him to face a devastating truth that he’s been a weapon in someone else’s game.

The prologue paints this tender, golden scene of Jason splashing around with his wife and daughter, and then the rest of the book rips it all away like a storm through glass. The tonal shift is brutal and effective. That opening chapter, when Jason is alone in his crumbling apartment, haunted by Lily’s memory and Emily’s departure, it’s raw and beautifully ugly. The way Wingham describes the smell of “dust, gun oil, and the faint remnants of whiskey” paints more than just a room. It’s a portrait of grief made physical. I felt suffocated just reading it.

And then there’s the violence. It’s not just graphic, it’s meticulous, clinical, even poetic in its monstrosity. The torture scenes with Ted Monroe made my stomach knot. Page after page, Wingham doesn’t flinch, and neither does Jason. One moment that stuck with me was when Jason presses his thumbs into a man’s eyes in an alley not out of rage, but because it “felt like the right thing to do.” That’s the kind of moral vacuum the book thrives in. And what’s wild is that it never feels gratuitous. It feels… honest. Ugly, disturbing, but honest.

What surprised me most was how The Reckoning of Jason turns itself inside out in the last act. When Jason realizes he was manipulated, the book takes on this sudden weight. The revenge is sadistic but also strangely justified in the warped world Wingham builds. The scold’s bridle, the rats, the blowtorch, it’s all medieval and horrific, but it’s laced with this cold clarity. Wingham doesn’t just show a monster; she lets you watch as that monster realizes he’s been someone else’s tool. The moment Jason mutters, “This wasn’t just a contract. This was personal,” I got chills. It’s that shift from killer-for-hire to grim executioner that sets this book apart.

In the end, this novel left me a little numb, a little shaken, but it stuck with me. It’s not for the faint of heart; the gore gets intense, but it’s also not mindless. It’s a slow dive into moral decay and grief so deep it turns a man into a myth. I’d recommend The Reckoning of Jason to anyone who likes their thrillers gritty, their characters broken, and their villains not so easily defined.

Pages: 89 | ISBN: 1764079205