I’ve heard from other people who’ve read this that it’s not a patch on Siler’s earlier works Iced and Easy Money and to a point I’d agree. What I am pleased with in this book is that Siler hasn’t carried on writing the same book time after time but has branched out into something different.

Siler’s first two books both featured strong female characters with criminal pasts and were told (as far as I remember) fron one point of view. Though the protagonists were different from each other if Siler had written another character who could be summed up in the same way she may have been on her way to “Dick Francis syndrome”. (I always feel that Dick Francis writes essentially the same lead character in every book, the background and specialisations change but the character seems to be the same ethical being every time. I enjoy reading Francis all the same but he’s not the writer that he could be.)

In this book there are three main characters who share the lead. Kevin is a journalist, he’s been sacked from MSNBC for concocting a fraudulent story and he gets interested in the death of his friend Carl Greene who told him that he had a big story for him. The second lead is Lucy, Carl’s widow, and the third a young burglar, Darcy, who is trying to go straight. Darcy is very much Siler’s trademark character though there are aspects of Lucy which fit too. Overall I think the inclusion of three leads does the book, and Siler’s career, much good though the plot itself here isn’t as interesting as in the other books.