While Talia delivers on gore and taboo, I'm not sure if it says more about me or the book that I was unfazed by even the worst of it. The writing and editing are filled with grammatical and continuity errors, and Talia's conversion from a wide-eyed young girl to a demonic vengeance-seeker was so abrupt it made no sense at all, but the most irritating part of this reading experience was how heavily the book relied on rape and descriptions of female bodies. If I had to read one more description of Talia's breasts or her "powder dry" hands, I was going to scream.

There's also something to be said for the lazy offensiveness of the tall, thick-bodied European woman as a villain, or the fact that one side character, whose only personality trait was a severe cocaine dependency, was referred to as "the light-skinned one" so many times in such few pages. Truly, I could go on for a while about the depictions of women in this book.

I feel like the author was probably going for a rape revenge fantasy along the lines of I Spit On Your Grave, etc., but unfortunately, it fell flat in every possible way. The only reason I'm giving this 2 stars instead of 1 is that some of the violence was pretty imaginative, but I don't see myself recommending this book, continuing the series, or read anything else of Volpe's.