The Lost Identity Casualties by Kim Ekemar

The Lost Identity Casualties by Kim Ekemar is a story of money, betrayal, and revenge. It's a page-turning thriller mostly written from the main lead's point of view. This fast-paced, action-packed novel will keep readers engaged until the very end of the story.

The main character is Matthias Callaghan, who awakes to find out that his face and hands are covered in bandages. Not sure about what happened as he lost his memory, Matthias is trying to find answers. After some efforts, he starts recalling the events which brought him this terrible physical damage. As he starts recovering his memory, we come to know about his past. How his father never took any interest in raising him and hence, his grandfather, a hardworking, intelligent businessman looked after his upbringing. Eventually, Matthias along with his friend Allan starts his own business and makes few mistakes while doing so.

We get to know more about Matthias, as bits and pieces of his memory are coming back to him. Because of mistaken identity, he gets on the radar of Russian mafia which results in losing his fingers and getting his face mutilated. One by one event starts getting registered to him and when he gets the whole picture, he seeks revenge from people who caused him so much of pain. Here starts the second part of the novel, which grabbed my attention a lot more than the first part as it shows some very intellectual moves made by Matthias to make these people fall for his well-thought plan. In this part of the novel, we come to know more about the operations of the Russian mafia and how Matthias uses their greed against them to take his revenge. At some point I felt, although few of the people deserved to face their fate brought by Matthias, not all of them deserved his fury. I felt him being unfair with some of the characters. Other readers might not share my view on this. But the author also tried to give this character (Matthias) some empathy which you get to see through his actions taken against Allan or Julia.  

The plot of the story is amazingly written. The writing style is simple which made this complex plot simpler to understand. Only required information about settings is given which helps to keep the reader engaged. I really liked few of the quotes from story like, "A trade well learnt will be forever faithful to you" or "It’s my firm conviction that using someone's greed is by far the easiest means if you want to manipulate him" or "Quality costs, but it gives you more value for the money". It’s clear that Kim Ekemar possesses good knowledge about face transplant surgery and made enough research on medical terminologies related to this surgery. The part which amazed me the most was, the way this process has been explained. The author had made it simpler to understand which succeeded to increase my interest in the novel.

Now about what I liked the least, reading the preface, I expected a well-written book. It was disappointing to find out, there are a lot of grammatical mistakes in the novel which is a huge distraction for the reader.

Despite all the negative points I have mentioned, there is a lot of potential in a story and the author’s efforts to bring this novel together are very much visible. You will get to see minute details described in the preface and another interesting thing is, all the characters are listed at the very end of the novel for the reference. The novel has an independent story still, the author has concluded it in a way that, I am looking forward to reading the second installment from the series.

I would like to give 3 out of 4 stars to this novel. The story has the caliber to attract the readers and keep them engaged but because of all the editing issues, it's not reaching up to the mark. The book contains the graphic details of the torcher of  Matthias, which I found very disturbing and hence I cannot recommend this book to the audience below the age of 18.