Published By: Viper
Pages: 416
Released On: 06/03/2025
A trial is rather like a play. We wear our costumes. We perform to the audience. And on a good day no-one gets murdered. Six nights a week the cast of the smash-hit play Daughter of the Revolution performs to a sold-out audience. A thrilling story of forbidden marriage and a secret love child, the critics say it’ll run for years. That is until one night the third act ends not in applause but in death, when leading lady Alexandra Dyce is beheaded live on stage.
Every cast member has a motive, but it is the dead woman’s co-star – and ex-husband – Hollywood legend Leo Lusk who is charged with the crime. When defence barrister Charles Konig is brought in last minute, he knows this ought to be the case of a lifetime. But Charles would rather be on his holiday trekking up K2, and he isn’t interested in celebrities, especially ones that seem to be mysteriously trying to derail their own defence. But as he and his co-counsel New York lawyer Yara Ortiz sift through the evidence, it becomes clear that clues may lie in the play itself. And that Charles’s only chance of victory is to identify the real murderer…
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Viper for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I had heard so many good things about this book that I knew I had to get a copy, even though I’ve never read any of his books before. But sadly it didn’t live up to my expectations.
It takes a lot of brain work, a lot of concentration. Particularly in the opening 10%, there’s a lot of historical names thrown around, historical and current, so I almost needed a notepad to keep up.
I am definitely on the fence with this. I think the concept was very good, it was so detailed with such depth, so many layers. But I found it very confusing and hard to read. Whilst I’m aware I said the depth was a positive thing, it’s also one of the drawbacks. It’s so involved that at times I was really struggling to keep up with it.
It flits between current narrative, articles, text messages, and website copy. It might be a formatting thing on my copy, but there’s wasn’t much definition between the styles, and so you’re reading it and then all of a sudden you realise you’re actually reading a newspaper article and you have to go back to the beginning to make sure you’re reading it in the right light.
I believe Guy has legal experience himself which gives an added extra to the courtroom scenes. Yes there’s artistic licence but generally it feels real. Which is to its credit. But on the flip side, there is a lot of legal detail and it tends to get bogged down i nthat.
None of the characters endeared themself to me, there’s so many of them but they had no real…character to them. They were quite flat, quite pantomime.
It started off strongly, but I’d say by about a quarter of the way through it lost its way, not really knowing what it was. It was a mashup of formats and confusion and didn’t seem to have much direction.
Overall, it had promise, it was a great concept, with thorough detail throughout. But it didn’t live up to what I had read. It felt clumsy, too detailed at times, a bit all over the place, and by the end it felt like a book I had to just get through.
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