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A review by turtletats
The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb
2.0
This shouldn't have been billed as a thriller.
The respectability politics were very dominant. The emphasis on always showing respect no matter how people treat you was really off.
I was going to give this 3 stars finding the novel lacking in subtlety and the characters pretty 2D, but still readable enough. The ending really ruined it for me though and bumped it down to 2 stars. Using the racist criminal "justice" system to get his own back and call for the thief to get maximal jail time?? The police abolitionist in me was horrified. It's harmful and unrealistic to expect that more heavy handed policing would do anything but further entrench racist police violence and white supremacy, so given the main themes of the book, this ending was politically inconsistent and just awful.
The respectability politics were very dominant. The emphasis on always showing respect no matter how people treat you was really off.
I was going to give this 3 stars finding the novel lacking in subtlety and the characters pretty 2D, but still readable enough. The ending really ruined it for me though and bumped it down to 2 stars. Using the racist criminal "justice" system to get his own back and call for the thief to get maximal jail time?? The police abolitionist in me was horrified. It's harmful and unrealistic to expect that more heavy handed policing would do anything but further entrench racist police violence and white supremacy, so given the main themes of the book, this ending was politically inconsistent and just awful.