Book Review: When Justice Burns by L.M. Soto
When Justice Burns by L.M. Soto
Genre: Adult Contemporary Romance
Tropes: Forbidden Romance, Thriller
Rating: ★
Binge: 🔥
Spice: 🌶️🌶️
Thank you to the author and Rattle The Stars PR for providing me with an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review! All thoughts and opinions are my own.
WORTH THE READ?
Absolutely not. The premise had so much potential, but the romance lacked chemistry, the characters' decisions rarely made sense, and the prose was so repetitive and over-explained that it constantly pulled me out of the story.
“She doesn’t flinch at the dark. She sees it every day. And still walks straight through it.”
THE REVIEW
I really wanted to like this book. A court reporter, a dangerous defendant, and secrets she was never supposed to uncover all spell out a recipe for a great read.
My biggest issue was the execution. The prose felt extremely formulaic and repetitive throughout the book. There was a constant reliance on the same sentence structures, particularly lists of three descriptors and variations of the “not X, but Y” construction. For example:
"She hadn’t just seen the mask—she’d looked beyond it."
Or another one:
“This is not a paperwork issue. This is a pattern."
Now, on its own, it doesn’t seem that bad. But this kind of sentence structure happens all throughout the book and gets old fast. The heavy use of em dashes also became increasingly distracting. I’m talking like 4-5 em dashes in a single page. And some are completely unnecessary:
"Then—the handle turned."
I usually don’t even pay attention to these things, but after a while, I started noticing the writing patterns instead of being immersed in the story.
This was especially noticeable in the dialogue. Characters frequently spoke in dramatic, polished statements that didn't feel like natural human conversation. Courtroom arguments, casual conversations, internal thoughts, and high-stakes confrontations all seemed to use the same polished, dramatic voice, which made it difficult to distinguish the characters from one another.
The book also has a serious tell-not-show problem. Almost every scene explains exactly what the reader is supposed to understand instead of allowing us to piece things together ourselves. I don't need every mystery solved for me as it happens. In fact, I want to use context clues and figure things out myself. When a character walks into a suspicious situation, I want to wonder why it's happening. When someone's motives are unclear, I want to speculate. Instead, the book frequently tells me exactly what something means almost immediately.
The POV was another issue for me. The book begins in a third-person omniscient style, which I was initially fine with, but the perspective isn't particularly consistent. Characters' perspectives can shift within the same scene or even within a few paragraphs, and then the second half becomes much more heavily focused on Claire. The changing perspective made the narration feel uneven rather than intentionally omniscient.
And the romance? SO unbelievable. Claire and Ethan meet, and almost immediately Ethan is thinking about how much she matters to him, how she understands him, and how he needs to protect her. Meanwhile, Claire becomes deeply invested in his case and starts taking increasingly reckless risks for a man she has known for an extremely short amount of time. There’s literally no development of how these guys have such intense feelings for each other.
“How do you look at me?” “Like you were already mine”
Mind you, this happens only 36% of the way through, and they haven’t even kissed. ONLY 36%!!
We're repeatedly told that they have this incredible connection, but I never actually felt it. Their relationship progressed because the plot needed them to be emotionally invested in each other, rather than because the story had given me enough moments to understand why they would be. That became especially difficult to accept when Claire started putting her nine-year career at risk for Ethan. She's a court reporter who is actively involved in his trial, yet she repeatedly crosses professional and legal boundaries to investigate things on his behalf. The book seems to recognize that these decisions are risky, but I never felt like Claire's reasoning was strong enough to justify them.
Dude, even the side characters seemed more aware of how ridiculous the situation was than Claire and Ethan were!
“The court reporter?” Jace’s voice was careful. “You sure that’s smart right now?”
And that's probably what frustrated me the most: the story occasionally acknowledges the obvious consequences, but the characters continue making the same questionable decisions anyway.
The thriller plot itself was kinda interesting, but the execution was not done well. There were some genuinely interesting ideas buried underneath everything, particularly the criminal operation and Ethan's vigilante persona, but the book often reads more like a summary of what happened than a fully developed story.
There are action scenes that suddenly appear with almost no buildup and dramatic moments that I think were intended to feel intense but instead felt strangely detached because I hadn't been given enough time to become invested in what was happening.
Even the villain felt underdeveloped and almost comical. There is an attempt to give him complexity through his motivations, but it never really landed for me. He ended up feeling more like a stereotypical cartoon villain than the nuanced antagonist the story seemed to be aiming for.
The spice was also underwhelming. There were a couple of spicy scenes, but because I didn't feel any chemistry between Claire and Ethan, the scenes didn't really work for me. I was more aware that the story was trying to get them into bed than I was invested in them actually getting there. For a book being compared to Den of Vipers, Twisted Hate, and Priest (3 very spicy books!), the spice just does not deliver in the same way at all.
I finished it mostly because I had committed to reviewing the ARC, and by the end I was reading more quickly because I wanted to be done rather than because I couldn't put it down.
Unfortunately, this one was not for me.
🚨 IF YOU'RE STILL HERE... Click for major spoilers for the entire book below.
Okay, now I can actually rant.
The biggest thing I could not get past was HOW QUICKLY CLAIRE AND ETHAN BECAME OBSESSED WITH EACH OTHER.
These people basically just met. And suddenly Ethan is thinking about Claire like she's the one person in the world who understands him.
You guys have known each other for less than a week. Shut the hell up. I would even understand if they had a one-night stand before the trial and then there’s actually a connection or reason to be attached to each other in some capacity. But nope. Claire just sees Ethan the second she walks into his bar and then apparently decides he’s the one for her, even though their longest interaction is some basic convo over some drinks.
Then we're getting lines about her being the key, how she matters to him, how she's different from everyone else, and how he wants her close. WHY??? There was simply no foundation for that level of attachment.
Claire's decisions became increasingly ridiculous. Why is this court reporter, who has absolutely no personal connection to this man, accessing court systems and investigating his case? Girl, YOU DON'T KNOW HIM. And you’re putting your nine-year career on the line for a guy who’s essentially a stranger?? Just because he’s hot does not mean you should throw everything away 😭
Then Claire and Ethan sleep together, and the chemistry still wasn't there for me. It felt like the story had been racing toward that scene rather than naturally building toward it. And then they don't use a condom, and there was no mention of birth control, which was another detail that pulled me out of the scene.
Then we get:
“She wasn't just his lover anymore; she was his accomplice.”
Girl, you literally just slept with this man. How are we already at "lover" and "accomplice"?
And then Ethan decides Claire is a target because she's connected to him. Except... SHE DIDN'T NEED TO BE CONNECTED TO HIM. He voluntarily pulled her into this. He literally invited the woman who works on his trial into his criminal investigation, revealed information to her, involved her in his operations, and then acted surprised that she was in danger. LIKE WHAT?? The whole situation felt so avoidable.
And then there's the three-week time jump. The story made the relationship and everything happening around it feel like it had unfolded over maybe a week, so when the three-week passage was mentioned, I genuinely had to stop and recalibrate.
Also, I have a huge gripe with the dialogue. It was just so unnatural!! Characters repeatedly speak in these dramatic, perfectly constructed statements about “messages,” “truth,” “scale,” “layers,” and “the operation,” when I just don't think normal people talk like that. There were so many moments where I wanted someone to just speak like a normal human being.
"Someone had placed that inmate in this room. Alone. With Ethan. No supervision. The cameras had been disabled. A hit dressed up as an accident."
Like, who thinks like this?? It’s literally bullet points crammed together to make a sentence.
“You’re asking the wrong question,” Nasir said. “You want names. You should be asking about scale.” Ethan leaned forward. “Then start talking.” The man chuckled. “Everything you destroyed had backups. Mirrors. Layers. What you burned was one node. A gesture.” The words settled heavily. “You didn’t dismantle the operation,” he continued. “You pruned it.”
By the end, Claire has essentially thrown away a nine-year career for a man she met weeks ago, and somehow I’m supposed to see that as this grand romantic sacrifice??
And now I’m dealing with the consequences.”“Your career—” “Was already over the second I didn’t show up.”
Genuinely, this book might be my biggest disappointment of the year. It’s only 266 pages and 266 pages too long. I kept reading it and hoping it would get better, but the book just got more and more ridiculous.
TLDR: this book was definitely NOT for me.
BINGE FACTOR
🔥
I literally only pushed myself to finish this because of the short page count, but the repetitive writing, rushed romance, and excessive exposition made the book feel much longer than its 266 pages.
WHO SHOULD READ THIS?
Read if you want:
Insta-lust/love
Cringe and repetitive dialogue
To waste your time
Skip if you want:
To retain your brain cells
Show-not-tell storytelling
Realistic and well-developed characters
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!
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