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OPUS: She is one of the best snipers in the world and she is for sale.
"The Contractors" is a book series that describes a group of mercenaries in modern wars. It's focus is on what makes people that choose a life, in one of the world's most violent and shady parallel societies tick,
In the books you are invited into an otherwise totally closed environment, where only very few outsiders are welcome. You get a unique insight to what substance the people whose job descriptions include murders, massacres, punishments and executions are made of and you come to understand how, despite a constant skepticism and distrust of everything and everyone, they manage to build friendships and bonds of love between each other.
The books are NOT "Feel Good" books - on the contrary. But if you want to get a unique glimpse of one both hated and admired subculture in our society, then be prepared to enter a universe of violence, murder, revenge and rough sex, where a human life is worth everything and nothing.
Welcome to the world of Contractors.
In the books you are invited into an otherwise totally closed environment, where only very few outsiders are welcome. You get a unique insight to what substance the people whose job descriptions include murders, massacres, punishments and executions are made of and you come to understand how, despite a constant skepticism and distrust of everything and everyone, they manage to build friendships and bonds of love between each other.
The books are NOT "Feel Good" books - on the contrary. But if you want to get a unique glimpse of one both hated and admired subculture in our society, then be prepared to enter a universe of violence, murder, revenge and rough sex, where a human life is worth everything and nothing.
Welcome to the world of Contractors.
460 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 29, 2025
8 people are currently reading
63 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 4, 2025
This is a novel about a very unusual female and you won’t know until the last few pages whether Opus is a villainess or a heroine.
On one level it’s a gripping story that tracks a young girl from solitary boarding school, a stint in the military and then to ‘self-employment’. What’s unusual is that her profession is killing people. She’s a mercenary - a hired gun. These are a dyed-in-the-wool anything-for-the-adrenaline-rush group of paid killers. They seem to be without morals, scruples or politics. They have become habituated to fighting and can’t let go. We are told by Opus that it’s not even money that motivates any more.
The text is unvarnished. Don’t imagine Bonny and Clyde gloss.
Opus is portrayed as bereft of feeling, though we get glimpses of the mental toll the life doles out. We see her and her colleagues traumatised by their acts. But PTSD isn’t treated - it is simply left to fester.
Fortunately for this reader the scenes of death and destruction are not dwealt upon too closely. Though, especially at the beginning of the book there are a lot of them.
Set-in a contemporary world of terrorists, errant security firms and the murky world of extra judicial assassination, the protagonist juggles grissly operations with bouts of sexual activity with fellow mercenaries. The descriptions hint at pleasure, but really show us a different kind of pain. It is the loveless anguish of shallow, mechanistic sex.
In Opus, we are shown a woman in a macho world where feelings are despised, ignored or suppressed. There will inevitably be consequences.
The narrative moves quickly from war zone to war zone. We get the feeling that Opus, with her androgynous name and hectic killing schedule isn’t simply the introvert she confesses to be, but has turned herself into something of an automaton. She eschews normal life for a world where cleaning your gun is the only focus for relaxation. It is scary for its lack of rational. What woman would have her complete childbearing apparatus removed in her twenties in case she is raped or tortured by the enemy?
But Lee Shye tells us that she has scrupulously researched the world of private armies. She’s checked and double checked this type of detail.
The fact that she translated this herself from her native tongue is in itself an impressive achievement. But the painstaking research she has also carried out, talking to mercenaries and gaining their trust goes above and beyond.
In reality, there are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people who are employed in this murky business. Apparently the private army called Wagner employed about 50,000 mercenaries in Russia in 2022. In Ukraine right now ‘security’ firms are paid by the US, EU and UK to deliver protection, arms and training. No western boots on the ground they say! But these are people might very well live in your street.
Aerospace & Defense News reported that the global private military and security industry will be worth over $457bn (£348bn) in 2030, up from about $224bn in 2020. That’s a lot of people, a lot of killing and a lot of harm.
In this book no one is concerned with the niceties of the Geneva convention - these people are at times as vicious as they are vulnerable.
Things can so quickly go wrong. The US aid distribution in Gaza employed over 300 different security companies. Operating under flimsy controls, it is said to have unnecessarily killed over 1,700 people. Some reports described the killings as ‘sport’.
The first few chapters take Opus at breakneck speed from one assassination to the next. Sometimes the ‘mark’ is one person, sometimes it’s a village, where whole families are ruthlessly and clinically eliminated, as if they were destroying cockroaches, not people.
There are glimpses of the outside world - the real world - where people work for enrichment - in all senses of the word. But we never really learn why Opus chooses her fate, if it isn’t for the money.
There’s a hideaway,owned by a fellow combatant, a mere hovel Opus might have turned into a home. There’s a security company set up and organised with the ruthlessness of a canny entrepreneur - not a bone-headed killer. But for Opus there seems to be no off-ramp.
The novel comes with a health warning, and I have to admit that I skipped some scenes. In me surfeit didn’t breed disgust (if that was the point). I wouldn’t have missed a bit of extra editing in some places. But killing and torture is foreground here, not background.
Right at the end of the novel Opus delivers her most gory revenge on people who have wronged her.
It is at this point where we question her feelings. Surely someone with such a weak moral compass could not become so enraged at another’s immorality.
The entire book is written in the first person and while much is described, Opus is not the insightful narrator we perhaps require. She says she is trained to be observant, but if that is true, there is much that is left unsaid. The reader is left to draw their own conclusions.
But my conclusions naturally widened to consider the cause of Opus’s plight. Was it an uncaring outside world that she grew to despise and then reject? Was she a psychopath - lacking away any human feeling? Was she the victor or the victim?
The novel ends with a glimmer of redemption, an act of kindness that reveals a chink of hope, suggesting that Opus might be capable of change.
However, I think that for women like Opus to change, the world must first change around them.
On one level it’s a gripping story that tracks a young girl from solitary boarding school, a stint in the military and then to ‘self-employment’. What’s unusual is that her profession is killing people. She’s a mercenary - a hired gun. These are a dyed-in-the-wool anything-for-the-adrenaline-rush group of paid killers. They seem to be without morals, scruples or politics. They have become habituated to fighting and can’t let go. We are told by Opus that it’s not even money that motivates any more.
The text is unvarnished. Don’t imagine Bonny and Clyde gloss.
Opus is portrayed as bereft of feeling, though we get glimpses of the mental toll the life doles out. We see her and her colleagues traumatised by their acts. But PTSD isn’t treated - it is simply left to fester.
Fortunately for this reader the scenes of death and destruction are not dwealt upon too closely. Though, especially at the beginning of the book there are a lot of them.
Set-in a contemporary world of terrorists, errant security firms and the murky world of extra judicial assassination, the protagonist juggles grissly operations with bouts of sexual activity with fellow mercenaries. The descriptions hint at pleasure, but really show us a different kind of pain. It is the loveless anguish of shallow, mechanistic sex.
In Opus, we are shown a woman in a macho world where feelings are despised, ignored or suppressed. There will inevitably be consequences.
The narrative moves quickly from war zone to war zone. We get the feeling that Opus, with her androgynous name and hectic killing schedule isn’t simply the introvert she confesses to be, but has turned herself into something of an automaton. She eschews normal life for a world where cleaning your gun is the only focus for relaxation. It is scary for its lack of rational. What woman would have her complete childbearing apparatus removed in her twenties in case she is raped or tortured by the enemy?
But Lee Shye tells us that she has scrupulously researched the world of private armies. She’s checked and double checked this type of detail.
The fact that she translated this herself from her native tongue is in itself an impressive achievement. But the painstaking research she has also carried out, talking to mercenaries and gaining their trust goes above and beyond.
In reality, there are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people who are employed in this murky business. Apparently the private army called Wagner employed about 50,000 mercenaries in Russia in 2022. In Ukraine right now ‘security’ firms are paid by the US, EU and UK to deliver protection, arms and training. No western boots on the ground they say! But these are people might very well live in your street.
Aerospace & Defense News reported that the global private military and security industry will be worth over $457bn (£348bn) in 2030, up from about $224bn in 2020. That’s a lot of people, a lot of killing and a lot of harm.
In this book no one is concerned with the niceties of the Geneva convention - these people are at times as vicious as they are vulnerable.
Things can so quickly go wrong. The US aid distribution in Gaza employed over 300 different security companies. Operating under flimsy controls, it is said to have unnecessarily killed over 1,700 people. Some reports described the killings as ‘sport’.
The first few chapters take Opus at breakneck speed from one assassination to the next. Sometimes the ‘mark’ is one person, sometimes it’s a village, where whole families are ruthlessly and clinically eliminated, as if they were destroying cockroaches, not people.
There are glimpses of the outside world - the real world - where people work for enrichment - in all senses of the word. But we never really learn why Opus chooses her fate, if it isn’t for the money.
There’s a hideaway,owned by a fellow combatant, a mere hovel Opus might have turned into a home. There’s a security company set up and organised with the ruthlessness of a canny entrepreneur - not a bone-headed killer. But for Opus there seems to be no off-ramp.
The novel comes with a health warning, and I have to admit that I skipped some scenes. In me surfeit didn’t breed disgust (if that was the point). I wouldn’t have missed a bit of extra editing in some places. But killing and torture is foreground here, not background.
Right at the end of the novel Opus delivers her most gory revenge on people who have wronged her.
It is at this point where we question her feelings. Surely someone with such a weak moral compass could not become so enraged at another’s immorality.
The entire book is written in the first person and while much is described, Opus is not the insightful narrator we perhaps require. She says she is trained to be observant, but if that is true, there is much that is left unsaid. The reader is left to draw their own conclusions.
But my conclusions naturally widened to consider the cause of Opus’s plight. Was it an uncaring outside world that she grew to despise and then reject? Was she a psychopath - lacking away any human feeling? Was she the victor or the victim?
The novel ends with a glimmer of redemption, an act of kindness that reveals a chink of hope, suggesting that Opus might be capable of change.
However, I think that for women like Opus to change, the world must first change around them.
January 21, 2026
A very fast moving story with characters that very few of us will have encountered either in the real world or in novels.
The key protagonist - Opus - is a female sniper, who works alone or within a group of military contractors, some of whom she develops intimate relationships with.
The sex is pretty hard core, often reflecting the violence of their lives, and is used as a mechanism to explore Opus' initial absence of feeling and empathy. As the story progresses we see Opus' relationships opening a window to her emotions and the possibility of actual love in a future that at this stage, she can only just glimpse.
We are given hints as to Opus' formation as a child and the experiences that have brought her to her current life. We are left with many intriguing questions about her youth which, I hope, will be revealed in a later book.
I was left with a certain degree of horror at what Opus is capable of, but strangely, I also developed sympathy for this very damaged woman - what could have brought her to this? I also came to feel hope that she will find the means to fill the void within her.
One has to wonder at the imagination and/or experience of Lee Shye in writing this novel. She must have either an immense imagination or a pretty unique history.
Ostensibly, this is a novel about military contractors, but actually it is about a woman in very extreme circumstances and her war with herself, as much as her war with others.
A fascinating read, and a novel I would recommend.
The key protagonist - Opus - is a female sniper, who works alone or within a group of military contractors, some of whom she develops intimate relationships with.
The sex is pretty hard core, often reflecting the violence of their lives, and is used as a mechanism to explore Opus' initial absence of feeling and empathy. As the story progresses we see Opus' relationships opening a window to her emotions and the possibility of actual love in a future that at this stage, she can only just glimpse.
We are given hints as to Opus' formation as a child and the experiences that have brought her to her current life. We are left with many intriguing questions about her youth which, I hope, will be revealed in a later book.
I was left with a certain degree of horror at what Opus is capable of, but strangely, I also developed sympathy for this very damaged woman - what could have brought her to this? I also came to feel hope that she will find the means to fill the void within her.
One has to wonder at the imagination and/or experience of Lee Shye in writing this novel. She must have either an immense imagination or a pretty unique history.
Ostensibly, this is a novel about military contractors, but actually it is about a woman in very extreme circumstances and her war with herself, as much as her war with others.
A fascinating read, and a novel I would recommend.
November 25, 2025
The Contractors delivers an unvarnished look at private military life, stripping away the Hollywood heroism and replacing it with tactical realism. The book exposes the emotional numbness, fractured loyalties, and grim decision-making that define mercenary operations today. It’s as informative as it is unsettling.
November 25, 2025
This book is less about war and more about the minds inside it. The author digs into the emotional mechanics of people conditioned to distrust, survive, and detach. The psychological honesty makes this story feel raw like reading the inside of someone’s trauma
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews