Aggressively fine is the best way that I can think of this book. It has its fun moments and I finished it, but it is not a book that I will go back to in the future.
The writing style in very blunt and the formatting almost seems cramped when you read it which fits in with the vibe of the story itself.
It reads almost like a children's book and the synopsis seems like it could be that of a children's story, but there is both suggestive and profane language throughout the book. So it is definitely a book for older teens or adults.
This is a perfectly fine book, but it's just not one that I particularly enjoyed.

I was given this advance copy, in exchange for an honest review. I must say this was a bit unusual. But the heart of it felt like a buddy heist novella. Dozier, the main character, reconnects with his old college professor, Pinder, to review the novella. Pinder was always for retelling his sailing excursions. Dozier took them to heart and I think writes of their own big jewel heist on the black widow ship and how they came to survive the sinking of said ship..Sounds like they went their own ways have had their own families grow up in their home towns of Manchester and Liverpool. Sounds like it took him sometime to sleep off all the effects of the heist and is lucky he even opened his eyes. Might make good reading for a high school forensics class to take a deep dive into. the forensics..Thanks to #NetGalley, the publisher,and#Angelo I was given this advance copy, in exchange for an honest review. I must say this was a bit unusual. But the heart of it felt like a buddy heist novella. Dozier, the main character, reconnects with his old college professor, Pinder, to review the novella. Pinder was always for retelling his sailing excursions. Dozier took them to heart and I think writes of their own big jewel heist on the black widow ship and how they came to survive the sinking of said ship..Sounds like they went their own ways have had their own families grow up in their home towns of Manchester and Liverpool. Sounds like it took him sometime to sleep off all the effects of the heist and is lucky he even opened his eyes. Might make good reading for a high school forensics class to take a deep dive into the meaning of everything Special thanks to #NetGalley, the publisher, #AngeloBandeziol,#The secret of the Black Widow for allowing me an advance review.

This sounded like an exciting adventure, almost Treasure Island like in concept, two people setting off to hunt down a treasure of a precious ruby worth some 30 million euros. The prologue set it up to be a meta style noir fiction and well…it is meta in the way that it uses the author’s name as a protagonist’s name but it’s nowhere near noir stylistically. You wouldn’t even notice this fail had the author not been so insistent that it is, indeed, noir. But alas, that is only one and nowhere near the main one of the failings of this novel.
Is it at least picaresque? Well, more so than it is noir, certainly. The story convolutes itself around a young man and his former professor who initially find themselves tied up in a creepy space Saw movie (the original) style and from there on proceed to figure out (and tell the readers) how they ended up in such a predicament. Turns out their treasure hunting didn’t go as swimmingly as they had planned; in fact, it ended up being something of a dangerous obstacle course. But will they get out of this mess? Will their find their precious ruby? Will they find love? Stay tuned, as they say.
Or don’t, really. My recommendation is the latter. It’s tough because mine is the book’s first review and, this being a debut, is obviously the author’s baby, but alas, not all babies are cute. Sorry, they just aren’t. This isn’t a cute baby. It had debut jitters, at the very least and kindest. The writing is somewhat stilted albeit objectively serviceable and decently edited), the plot is too convoluted, the ending is a clichéd travesty, the characters are not likable and most noticeable, the narrative voice (of any character, this isn’t subtle enough for differentiations) is offputtingly arrogant and brash in a way (the best way I can describe it) of a young person who thinks they are way smarter than they actually are.
I made every effort to get into this book, but that narrative voice just put me off at every turn and made it impossible to care about any of it. So, honestly, the best thing to be said about this is that it was relatively brief. Mind you, this is just one person’s opinion, but then again that’s what reviews are. I consider this to have been a waste of time. Maybe someone will think it’s Treasure Island two. Who knows. Thanks Netgalley.