I feel like it’s been a while since I’ve read one of this series. Four years in fact (this is one reason why I like to keep records). But it looks as if I’m up to date now. Which is both pleasing and disappointing.

The series hangs less around Simon Serrailler with every book. I find his sister and her family far more interesting characters to return to and now his sister’s married his boss he feels all a bit irrelevant, though the boss is even less interesting. I’m ever bemused by the author’s decision to make Simon and Cat two-thirds of a set of triplets and then never have the third triplet feature in the series. Possibly I’m forgetting something, and I know there are series-adjacent novellas (or possibly short stories) that I haven’t read so maybe Ivo turns up there. I should probably check them out for completeness sometime. The ‘Change of Circumstance’ title seems though to be the author trying to get Simon out of the boring rut he’s driven himself into and to metamorphosise him, perhaps, into a slightly different character, though I thought the way he was going about it was both very in character and not really very nice all at the same time.

Anyway, so much for the family saga, the plot here concerns county lines drugs gangs who use young children as drug runners. There were some good characters featured here, and I’d have liked some of them to have had more time on the page, but some details just didn’t seem to add up and that spoilt the ending of the book a bit. Basically it felt like there was a lot of character and not a great deal of plot. Which is fine really, and I enjoyed the read, and I’m presuming that there will be more in the series and I’ll enjoy them too but I won’t be rushing out to read them either.