Book Review: "The Defence" by Steve Cavanagh

This book was recommended to me by Twitter and I’m seriously reconsidering taking recommendations from that hellscape. The first novel in a series is supposed to be the one that hooks you in, makes you fall in love with characters and themes and establish real in-depth parts of the backstory to you. This book does none of those things and yet, is so confident about itself that it completely fails to give the reader a coherent story that they can get lost in. I would say the audience of this book is basically people who don’t like to read - why? There’s no atmosphere, there are no in-depth concepts, there is no real story and the characters are hollow as hell. I was quite underwhelmed after reading this, it just felt so forgettable.

The main character is a lawyer who must perform a task for the Russian mafia or his daughter will be killed. If that isn’t a cliché then I don't know what is. The ‘tough guy’ must have one of their female relatives threatened with rape, death or both in order to start his ‘redemption’ arc. Why don’t we just make ‘Sicario’ again while we are at it, it’s basically the same story. It is a tired trope, especially when it comes to men writing rape threats regarding female children. If this was 1995, perhaps it would be called inventive and new - but now? Well, just imagine me yawning into oblivion over and over again.

Next, there’s no atmosphere at all. There’s just action, action, dialogue, some obligatory backstory and more action. The backstory is never really there beforehand - there really could've been one book on the backstory of this Eddie Flynn character - instead there’s just random moments inserted into action sequences in which we are supposed to care about something. The problem with this is that it seems genuinely a bit too convenient and comes off as sloppy writing. Please don’t forget Chekhov’s ‘father’s day’ pen in which a pen for father’s day is conveniently inserted into the storyline and randomly remembered by the protagonist. A few pages later, the pen is used to do something important. Imagine my shock. Have you ever watched those really cheaply made movies from the 2000s which were part of the thriller genre but they were so crap that nobody really went to watch them, though they’re always on TV and usually star Jason Statham? Yeah, this book is exactly like those movies. McLiterature.

The court sequence is very unimaginative and feels very Hollywood-esque. It has no atmosphere and is almost entirely consisting of boring, clichéd dialogue. This means that tension basically doesn’t exist and the pacing is pretty poor. There’s a whole section surrounding handwriting and it all just feels very forced and wrong. None of it actually feels realistic and this takes the reader out of the story, making us feel very disconnected from the whole experience. What is being said seems very predictable and you don’t even feel like you need to read it in order to know what is going on. There’s nothing that makes the reader wait with bated breath for anything - we are just constantly waiting for the main character to make his point. In reality, this sort of back and forth plus the stupid rambling the protagonist does would get him thrown out of the courtroom.

If I have said ‘men can’t write women’ before then I’ll have to say it again here. There’s a theme especially in the 21st century of men not being able to write women, which I find weird since women don’t have any problems writing male characters. The women in this story are plot devices or projections of (perhaps) the author’s wants of women. First we have chapter 2, in which we already have a rape threat against a female child (yes, chapter 2). Next we have the idea that a prostitute that the main character ‘saves’ becomes a therapist and treats his tension headaches. She isn’t even given a proper name - she’s just ‘Boo’ and she has a nice body apparently. Then we have Christine who’s entire personality revolves around the main character feeling upset that he lost her as a wife - and we are supposed to feel sorry for him? I don’t think so. He messed up his marriage and that is entirely his problem. Apart from this, the first meeting between the main character and Christine was when she got into a taxi, with a man, and started redressing herself. This would never happen in real life. Ever. Full stop. I think even most men know this unless they are as dumb as this author.

Then we have the bomb-threat storyline in which Eddie has a bomb strapped to him so that the Russian mafia can take advantage of him and that he can kill some guy whom the reader again, doesn’t give a crap about. First of all, he would never get into a 21st century courtroom with a bomb strapped to him, he would then never be able to do all this Batman shite to escape the criminals, then he would never be able to get away from a police officer who visits him about a bomb threat. I think that the protagonist is constantly being projected as the smartest guy in the room whilst simultaneously being the most unlikeable piece of crap you'll ever read in 21st century literature. So it doesn’t really connect with the reader.

I’m sorry, but I will have to say that this book is an embarrassment to the thriller genre. It is just plainly terrible.