What a book…. I read it all in one day, though honestly there are three factors in play for the reason why I finished this one so quickly and I’ll explain them for you.

Firstly, I’m led to believe this is book #6 in a series? I’d assume? Based on the other reviews and a quick search of the author, there are 5 books before this one. it works well as a standalone, that I can assure you, though some of the context gets lost on you if you haven’t got those missing pieces. Mainly surrounding the history of the characters, their deepest motivations and reasons for doing things - these all seem to be questionable as they aren’t fully explained in this book. However it honestly doesn’t change or impact the story too much but it meant I spent less time pouring over the characters as I had no deepset connection to them (potentially my fault for not reading the previous books in the series, but I’m analysing it from a standalone POV which it was advertised to me as).

Second factor would be the amount of scene setting that the author does. I found long paragraphs with very little relevant information besides preaching a hate speech propaganda type message - themed in line with the story but a bit overkill in my opinion. After the first few times its like “okay, we get it, they’re racist and extremists, stop fucking telling us now” you know? Easy enough to skip through whilst still getting the gist of the story. However towards the end for me it got a little bit confusing with all of the extremist stuff as it all came out at once, meaning I skipped a few paragraphs here and there to get back on track with the story. Not an issue, just an observation I made.

And thirdly, the plot line. That’s what honestly kept me reading. Think early seasons of Brooklyn 99 - focused on cases and not manufacturing a deeper plot line of romance etc etc that would’ve lost the stories original purpose. I love seeing cases play out, wondering how the defence is going to handle certain evidence, whether they’ll get the case thrown out etc etc. thankfully this author didn’t forget that this was a story about an actual case, and kept returning to it which kept me interested. The whole time of reading I couldn’t wait to find out how he was going to explain certain things and where new evidence would come in etc.

Overall I loved this book, I did. The message inside of it is very important and the themes written about are no joke and need to be handled delicately which I think Cavanagh did very well. I actually am considering reading the others in the series now, because this book was so good.