This is the first of Alafair Burke's novels I’d read and unfortunately, it wasn’t quite as good as I hoped. It felt like a first draft - with some changes in structure, I really think there is potential in this book for it to become a powerful thriller.

I enjoyed reading from a career-driven female lead (Olivia), but I thought her voice needed to be split into parts – present Olivia and past Olivia. The long, seemingly random tangents that the author is forced to go into to explain the history between Jack (the client/suspect) and Olivia – an important sub-plot of the central storyline – broke the story up and made it harder to follow. If those parts could have been incorporated as flashback chapters every now and again instead, it would have worked so much better.

The fact that I also guessed how the story would end within the first 30 pages didn’t help my enjoyment of the story. The wait to see if I was right got a little tedious, and then the epilogue was just awful. It kind of implied this idea/theory/thing rather than told it outright, and I know that readers that didn’t guess it early on will be confused.

Overall? I did enjoy this book. I don’t normally read mysteries from the defence’s POV so it was interesting to see how that worked and I feel like I learnt something about the American justice system. I’ll definitely be reading more of this author’s works, especially her standalone thrillers, but this one wasn’t for me.

Review copy provided by the publisher for an honest review.