Paperback, 272 Pages
Crime Thriller/ Adult
By: Stephen Clark
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟 3/4
“He never got a chance to become a man because some officer decided to be judge, jury and executioner.They need to arrest that cop, whoever he is.”
🌟 I would like to start by thanking the author for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review. This does not change my opinions on this one.
🌟 When I first saw the synopsis for this one, it reminded me of The Hate U Give and after reading it, I can see why I thought that. I am not saying this is a copy of that but this is also a shooting story where the victim is black and the officer who shot him was white. The story is told from 3 characters POV: Ryan which was written in 1st person POV and then we have Jade and Kelly both written in 3rd person POV. I don’t know why the author chose to do this because I did not feel it had a positive impact on the story but to be fair, it did not have a negative impact either.
🌟 The plot seems more mature and more realistic than the one in THUG and I encourage people who like that book to read this one. THUG definitely had a lot of buzz and it did get that for good reasons. I think this one is not less important and that it should be read by more readers. The thing I like is that the author added both the officer’s and victim’s family’s POV rather than one of them and then it presented facts and you as a reader can choose what to think for yourself. I felt that the author’s job as a journalist helped keeping it bias-free and I love that. I don’t like when books have the good vs bad guys in those kind of stories because we know life is way more complex than that!
🌟 I am not usually a guy who talks about TW but I think it is worth mentioning there are quite a few things that are dealt with here, including: Racism, shooting, death, drugs, cheating and others. This is definitely not a light read.
🌟 The characters felt real and I loved to see how they think and what they felt, a thing that the author succeeded in doing. What knocks out a few stars is the romance in this book! I felt whenever romance was involved it was weird, very fast and not very believable for me. Maybe some things were done for the sake of surprise but I would say it had more of a negative rather than a positive impact on the story for me!
“You didn’t accuse me of being a tough cop. You accused me of being a racist cop. But you’re the racist. And I will never ever apologize for being a white man”
🌟 Summary: A good book with important topics to discuss through multiple fleshed out characters and good pacing. The romance was not my cup of tea but the story was, can recommend for fans of THUG and crime stories!
The book prescription 