Author: Steve Cavanagh
# of Pages: 323 (hardback)
Genre: Adult, Thriller, Mystery
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Synopsis: They were Hollywood's hottest power couple. They had the world at their feet. Now one of them is dead and Hollywood star Robert Solomon is charged with the brutal murder of his beautiful wife. This is the celebrity murder trial of the century and the defence want one man on their team: con artist turned lawyer Eddie Flynn. All the evidence points to Robert's guilt, but as the trial begins a series of sinister incidents in the court room start to raise doubts in Eddie's mind. What if there's more than one actor in the courtroom? What if the killer isn't on trial? What if the killer is on the jury?
Review: Yes, this is the 4th book in the series. No, it's not a problem to read it as a standalone book.
Cavanagh chosen genre and style is very similar to John Grisham books, so fans of Grisham's should definitely give Cavanagh's Eddie Flynn series a shot. Unfortunately, I'm not a fan of Grisham's, so I was sitting at a 2 star rating for Th1rt3en while reading the beginning 2/3's of the book.
The prose is pretty simple and therefore very accessible to a broad audience (apparently the average reading level in the US is at a 7th grade level). The protagonist Eddie Flynn is some ex-con artist (a bad boy) who's turned into a defense lawyer who has high moral standards on only saving the innocent from wrongful sentencing (savior). His strong sense of duty toward this greater good might be breaking apart his family, but it's something that's framed as something the reader should sympathize with Flynn for rather than his wife that is upset with his dangerous lifestyle. I'm imagining this is some idealization of a man FOR men - clearly not something I'm the target audience for. Definitely was not a fan of reading about these types of people nor the simplistic writing style. Especially since I read Miracle Creek just before this, I was settling this book on the two star rating because I liked the style so much less that that book (which I also gave 3 stars).
The premise of having a serial killer on the jury is what drew me into reading this book (and that I heard it's trending on BookTok). I'm used to mystery's being a bit thrilling due to the nature of the genre, but I wasn't expecting it to be as much of a thriller as it was. Yes there are descriptions of the murders and what is done to the bodies (not unexpected), but Cavanagh also incorporated descriptions about the villains' (evil) facial expressions and built suspense when a character is near these villainous characters that made it a bit more of a thriller than others of this genre.
It was the last third of the book that ultimately made me decide to give this book 3 stars. Every mystery has at least one "reveal", and I was caught completely off guard by this book's reveal. I had to re-read the paragraph a few times to see if I was understanding what happened correctly, it was so unexpected. In retrospective, it made me appreciate how the author laid out the story to deceive the reader, even if I didn't like the style it was written in. Therefore, and extra star was granted.
I would recommend this book to people who already know they like the style and genre of Grisham's books. For the twist, I don't regret reading this book, but it's definitely not my top choice. I won't be reading any other books in this series.
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