I received an audio ARC through NetGalley for an honest review.

Unlike Borrowman, I feel it is important for me to state my biases going into this review and how mistaken my initial assumptions about this book were. The political label I cleave the closest to is anarcho-socialism and I was hoping this might be an interesting or at least a somewhat balanced work of historical fiction. I absolutely was not prepared for a Roosevelt and Pinkerton fan fiction.

This is not going to be my most professional and serious review.

There aren't many books I have read in their entirety that I loathed as much as this book. Logic dictated I DNF this after a handful of chapters, but the sheer magnitude of my hatred insisted thst I complete it to be able to review the whole thing.

The TLDR is the Community Meme:

I can accept the atrociously pedestrian and interminable writing, but I draw the line at making up an evil and craven anarchist and a union leader to get mad about and a senator and a Pinkerton to positively dawn over.

The heroes and villains of this books are entirely fictional and bear no resemblance to their historical analogues.

For our villains we have Big Jim Fitzsimmons is the most ludicrous caricature of an evil union leader boogie man, Angel Casimer is the most ridiculously vain and self important anarchist I've ever come across (and I've interacted with twitter anarchists) who seems to have a strange obsession with his own fame and great man theory for a supposed anarchist, a Wall Street Bolshevik shorting stocks for Lenin??? For our heroes we have Teddy Roosevelt, our manic libertarian dream boy, Senator Ellis, the all American boy detective, and Any Petit, the bravest, most honourable, and pillar of integrity...the Pinkerton detective.

As I have said, I am biased, but the politics and historical revisionism are genuinely hilarious, as is Barrowman's fundamental lack of understanding of what anarchism actually is, which is amongst other things fundamentally being against unjust hierarchy, so the idea that anarchism 'assumes leaders would naturally arise' is utter laughable.

The prose is dull. The story is boring. Everyone on the 'good' team talks exactly the same. Everyone talks out loud way too much. The passive narrator and 'goodies' are absolutely used as mouth pieces for the author to pontificate on. There's whole asides describing short selling for dummies that seem to only exist because of meme stocks and to pad things out.

This is called a political thriller, but there's nothing thrilling. No tension. No emotion or interest. The whole thing is a sterile political cartoon.

Genuinely one of the worst books I've ever read it its entirety.

I would abhor it, if it wasn't so fucking boring.