I thought this mystery was a cut above most of the first-of-a-series Kindle freebies I've tried. I enjoyed the balance between the fisticuffs action (Sasha McCandless is a practitioner of some sort of martial arts, and frequently finds occasion to use it) and the legal background. Miller is, apparently, a practicing commercial lawyer, and perhaps if I were more familiar with that world, I would have found the fairly detailed explanations of procedures and corporate culture in a large commercial law firm tedious. But I'm not, and I didn't.  The writing was good, and the pages turned quickly.

Miller is clearly setting up her primary romantic pairing in this novel, using the good old romantic trope of having her heroine and her consort in physical conflict before pretty quickly becoming an investigative team together. Fortunately (for my tastes) the romance did not proceed beyond a bit of sleeping platonically on the same bed in this volume.

I have so many very reliably good mystery authors I follow (chief amongst them Ian Rankin and Peter Robinson, Brandreth for his whimsical Oscar Wilde stories, and until lately P.D. James) that I never feel like committing to another series - but this one would at least come under serious consideration if I ran out of my favourites.

Meh.

This book really should have been a movie.  That way, I could have sat back, relaxed and enjoyed seeing the action unfold.  I tend to be more willing to suspend disbelief when it's on the screen playing out in front of me.

Truth is, I quite enjoyed the first part of this book.  Author Melissa F. Miller does a great job of skewering the law firm culture, exposing the greed for money and power, and the way it sucks the life and the humanity out of lawyers and clients alike.  I've always been very comfortable with my choice to make three times less than my colleagues by following my passion and serving the public interest in a government job, but that choice was also based on personal considerations.  I wanted to travel.  I wanted to sleep in on weekends.  Hell, I wanted to eat lunch!

Then we get bogged down in this mystery that isn't one, and Miller loses me completely.   She takes a likeable character and turns her into a pawn.  The character must now break away from her normal environment, which was interesting in and of itself, in order to solve a crime and outwit the crimnals, but there is virtually no suspense.  We know what the crime is.  We know when it will occur.  We know who the perps are.  So we are locked into pages and pages and pages of fake intrigue before we finally get the outcome we predicted long ago.  SO disappointing.

And then there is the narrator, who makes tough-as-nails Sasha sound hesitant and girly, and commits the ultimate sin of dumbing down every person of colour in the book by having them spout ebonics.  To say I was not impressed would be an understatement - and I'm not one of those listeners who is hard on narrators.  Just know your characters!

So I can't recommend this book, because it was a crash course in what NOT to do.

I have to say that out of the past couple of books in this series I definitely liked this one more than the others. I did enjoy reading about both of the storylines but I did have a problem regarding the one involving Connelly's father. I don't quite believe that Connelly would agree to do what he did, so that was definitely out of character. I really enjoyed the medical research plotline in this book. One of the only things I was a bit disappointed in was the lack of action. The action at the end was good but I would have liked more.