Graphic: Suicide, Fire & Fire Injury, Grief, Death of a Loved One, Medical Scenes, Racism. Moderate: Missing Person, Slavery.

Thank you Netgalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review! Representations: https://trello.com/c/VCDroEhD/131-black-tag-by-simon-mayo Feels a tad generic, but with some very wild curveballs thrown in with not much research lmao. The characters largely were just a bit meh. Nothing too spectacular, nothing too bad. Famie just feels like a general "investigative journalist" with a moral compass that seems to be a generally common trope at the moment, but she wasn't an annoying point of view at least and decently solid to follow along with. It did get a little confusing who was what, even at the end I was still getting confused about how someone related to someone else. Just felt like too many characters, with not enough information on a lot of them. Plot was a bit wild. The main crime had a decently solid thread through it - if not just a bit weak - and knew where it was wanting to go. But.. then there was just a load of really weird side tangents in it. One of them was a constant mention of a specific video game, XIII - even throwing shade at the developers of the remake for the bad release for some reason - but (and this isn't a spoiler tbh) it leads to literally nothing lol. It was described weirdly and just had no use being there except for the shade towards the devs, and a bit of shade towards just, gamers in general I think?? It was weird. And on the topic of tech - if you're going to have "Base Sixtyfour" in your book, at least convert the string into B64 to see what it is - and see it's an alphanumeric string of 108 characters and not "thousands of letters, signs and symbols" 😂 Also PLEASE stop using the colour green for "hacking" scenes, it's such a tired trope that's so bad lmao. Though I'll be honest that scene was just so bad it was hilarious - all tension was stripped from the scene and I was genuinely just laughing my ass off at how dumb it was. So minus points for not doing basic research, bonus points for hilarity lol. It is pretty slow paced, but it at least keeps things going. It was an easy read, and didn't take that long (I've just been pretty busy) keeping my interest decently well tbh. I have literally no idea where in the series this book is, if it's book 2 or 3, but it's certainly not book 1 despite literally no where mentioning this is part of a series. Do better, publishers. Luckily though you can read it fully standalone I'd say, it gives background context to some things (maybe a bit too often) and feels like a contained story.