It became very grating, especially during those blasted monologues.

I get that Joel Leslie does really good accents, and I enjoyed his accents, but the main narration took on an overblown, overdramatic tone as if he's reading a soap opera script. Therefore HOURS of this book were a struggle for me as I waded through all of the monologues to get to the core of the story. Authors who do this are just going for word count, and not the fluidity of the storytelling. I eye-roll so hard I get a look at my own brain. Long, repetitive internal monologues ruin stories for me. To make things worse, a lot of the content is then cut and pasted later in the book as the character charts their growth from 'bad place at the start of the book' to 'happy place'. Nothing can turn me off a book as quickly as ten pages of drivel about a character's backstory and them wondering about the if's, but's, and why's of where his life went wrong. One of my biggest bugbears with books, no matter the genre, is the internal monologue. I'd heard good things about this book and the narrator, but I've learned the lesson that 'its all about taste', here. With the world's attention fixed on Tom and this case, secrets from his past explode during the course of the trial, which place him at the very center of the case and make him the only man who can try to stop the world's slide into war. As Russia beats the drums of war and the United States struggles to contain the trial before it races out of control, secrets and lies, past and present, collide in his courtroom, before his bench. The Russian president is gravely injured and fixated on revenge, while a gay Russian dissident is arrested and put on trial in Judge Tom Brewer's courtroom. He wants to be out and proud, but he can't erase his own past, and the lessons he learned long ago.Ī devastating terrorist attack in the heart of Washington, DC, and the capture and arrest of the terrorist lead to a trial that threatens to expose the dark underbelly of America's national security. In the closet for 25 long years, he's climbing out slowly, and, with the hope of finding a special relationship with the stunning Mike Lucciano, US Marshal assigned to his DC courthouse. Federal Judge Tom Brewer is finally putting the pieces of his life back together.

Hush tal bauer