Trawling the sordid, brutal London underworld for answers, Finn exposes dark family secrets and faces danger at every turn. But he's about to learn that it's the people you trust who can hit you the hardest...
I recently finished reading ‘Confessions of a Murder Suspect by James Patterson’. The premise of these two books seemed similar to me when I picked up this one and read the summary. In both cases, the main suspect is the child of the victim and both the families had a lot of dark secrets. But that’s where the similarities end.
Finn Maguire discovers his step father murdered and once police is involved, he becomes the main suspect in the case. Finn doesn’t trust the Detective in charge of the case and decides to take matters into his own hands and starts investigating on his own. What he does find leads him to the underground world of organised crime and things get more and more murky and dangerous. The book follows Finn’s journey to find out the truth and clear his name.
First, the characters… There wasn’t a single character in the book that I can point out as the one I liked, including the protagonist Finn. I have read enough books to have come across plots involving regular people rising above their ordinary life to solve a mystery. In most cases there is something to the protagonist’s character or their path that would make it easy to believe in them. But in this case it was really difficult to believe in Finn. He is careless, ruthless with his boxing training as the only trick up his sleeve. The way he handled things were outrageous and most of the time it was just luck and coincidence that he came across some clue or came out alive in a situation. I could almost imagine Professor McGonagall awarding him points for ‘sheer dumb luck’. Another thing that I did not like was the way the author handled the matter of dyslexia. I found it to be very insensitive and not properly handled. According to Wikipedia – ‘Dyslexia is characterized by difficulty with learning to read fluently and with accurate comprehension despite normal intelligence.’ Having Finn blaming all his faults on his dyslexia wasn’t really fair because people who read this book without prior knowledge of this syndrome may come out of it with wrong idea about it. Dyslexia isn’t responsible for Finn’s inability to connect with people or him functioning normally in his day to day life or even in this situation.
The only saving grace of this book that made it possible for me to complete it was the few twists that were incorporated into the plot. Few seemingly innocent information sums up to something entirely different. Also, Finn’s love for boxing made way to some pretty good action scenes that were intense.
Overall, Mystery and Thrillers being my top favourite genre, I found this book not up to the mark and will not be reading it a second time.
Have any of you read and liked this book? Tell me more about your reading experience of this book in the comments section.
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