Thirteen - Steve Cavanagh

Thirteen is the 4^th book in Steve Cavanagh’s Eddie Flynn series.  While this book can stand alone, I feel that the reading may be more engaged with the main character if they knew more of his back story.

Bobby Solomon, one of the hottest actors of the time is on trial for the murder of his also famous wife and their chief of security. In this case, the killer is not the defendant but a serial killer so intent on getting away with his crime that he works his way onto the jury.   

Bobby’s hot shot legal team finds Eddie Flynn, a local defense attorney who is not afraid to go after the police department but as the trial gets under way and more information comes to light, Eddie turns out to be Bobby’s only hope.  Eddie employs everything from legal maneuvering to sleight of hand to keep Bobby from going to jail for the rest of his life but it might not be enough as the serial killer works from the inside to gut the jury.

This was a an interesting mix of police procedural and psychological thriller.   

I found the pacing of the first third of the book to be a little slow and disjointed. There were a few course changes so fantastically improbably that I found them to be unbelievable.  The story telling really picks up as the trial begins and there are enough twist and turns and red herrings to keep the reading guessing and surprised.

The entire novel is written without a setting in the sense that nothing was described, not the wood grain of the bench, the leather interior of the car, the leaves on the trees. Just as in books where the setting is so important as to become its own character, the lack of setting in this book was just as glaringly noticeable and made everything read in grey-scale.

Thank you to the publisher for the ARC in exchange to my honest opinion.