So I started this book on May 1st (according to my Goodreads updating which tends to be fairly accurate). It's now September. It wasn't even that I was picking this book up occasionally. I just never wanted to pick it up after the first fifty pages. The only reason I did finally go back to it was because I'm trying to clear out my currently reading shelf. The strongest feeling I have upon finishing it is relief that it's not hanging over my head anymore.

The biggest issue for me was the writing style. Like I had issues with the story and characters and whatnot as well that I'll probably discuss a bit, but mostly it was just the writing. Everything felt so clunky.

This may be the first time I've ever fully appreciated the "talking heads" complaint. There were so many sections in the book that were nearly all dialogue, either back and forth between characters or just paragraphs and paragraphs of explanation. It was almost devoid of description, even when that description would have been necessary to link a scene together. The best example came from early on (bear with me, this is lengthy):

"Want to get out of here, maybe hit some clubs downtown?"
"No thanks," she said, looking around for her father.
Her father cut in at last. "He's an impressive young man, Alex. Why don't you like him?"
"Travis plays the perfect Southern gentleman, but underneath, it's all about Travis. He's always looking over your shoulder to see if someone more important is in the room. Besides, I hate bow ties."
A club steward approached them. "Excuse me, Miss Harrington. I have a phone call for you on the club phone. A woman says it's urgent."
Gladys's voice was tense. "I've got Carmela and her cousin and son in the car. The police let them go. We're heading to my place."

The whole book read like that, I didn't just pick one particularly bad section. There was no flow with the action, no description to link the different points together. The steward says there's a phone call and we cut immediately to Gladys's dialogue, not even a quick addition of "Gladys's voice on the phone was tense." At points it genuinely made the book a little difficult to follow because it was so easy to miss small things, like Gladys being on the phone instead of there at the party. And again, that's one small example and it wouldn't have bothered me had it not been indicative of the book as a whole.

Also, the dialogue was so unrealistic. That's not always something that bothers me a great deal because some people talk weird and I'm one of them, but these didn't sound like people at all. They sounded like they were announcing the plot as they went along rather than speaking conversationally.

Then it was just generic things like telling not showing. I didn't feel anything about this book. Everything was just told to me. Alex said this. Mike said that. Alex felt this. The cops did that. On and on and on. I never felt like I got a chance to experience this story because of the writing style.

But getting past just the writing into the story elements, it felt very soap opera-y. At one point they're hanging out in Mexico and this nobody reporter has a meeting with the Mexican present. I was so confused by that when it happened because it came out of nowhere and I kept thinking I was mistaken, maybe Dardess meant the president of the newspaper or a company. Nope, the literal Mexican president. And Alex didn't act like an adult most of the time. She's 25, but spent half her time worried about her parents finding out what she was doing. When she went to Mexico, she literally switched cars and paid cash so they couldn't find her. Like, she's an adult with her own apartment and a good job. I don't understand what her parents can do to her beyond cutting her off (although that good job covered all her expenses) or being generally annoyed. It didn't feel like the actions of the self sufficient adult she was supposed to be.

The main characters, all of them, also just got kidnapped constantly. For a bunch of human traffickers, they really sucked at kidnapping apparently. Like once or twice I could handle, but it felt like they spent half the book getting kidnapped and getting free again.

It also wasn't just the writing style that felt choppy, but the narrative as a whole. It's a pretty short book at under 270 pages, but there were 61 chapters. And a lot of the chapters switched between characters and scenes. We'd follow Alex then Mike then back to Alex then the bad guys. Each time it was only a couple of pages, maybe just two. It felt like there was never time to sink into the story.

I didn't really like the perspective from the bad guys. I've read plenty of thrillers that have used the villain's perspective to open up the narrative a bit, but it didn't really work here. The chapters that focused on Vargas, the head human trafficker, were really just him making plans or talking about how his plans were messed up. They didn't contribute anything to the overall story. I felt like had more time been spent on Alex and her life instead, I'd have maybe cared about her a little bit more.

I really want to add something positive just because I feel like I've been so negative in this review, but I can't think of anything. I really didn't like this book. I didn't hate it. Like it definitely wasn't a terrible horrible one star because the majority of my complaints were on the smaller side, but it was still pretty bad.