The Cage by Bonnie Kistler

 

This book is very much playing in the Legal Thriller category, but it takes a long, long time to get started, and the first-person narrator is clearly unreliable and not ever telling the reader something. Her big secret comes out in the end, after some extensive over-clever legal maneuvering--it might be plausible legal maneuvering, I'm not a lawyer, but it seems a bit on the too-clever-to-actually-work side, it relies on the narrator being the only clever lawyer in the novel. None of the characters are particularly interesting--the first-person narrator is a clever lawyer but otherwise as shallow as a sheet of paper, and the antagonists have even less dimensionality than that; most of the characters are like specks or dots. The prose is kinda flat and the author keeps inserting chapters from villainous POV, which honestly doesn't work too well for this, having the plots and plans revealed by the first-person narrator finding them seems as though it would have made for a more engaging novel--though her unreliability might have been a problem, there. The fact the novel skitters around a couple of timelines, at least at first, doesn't do it any favors, either, but that does settle down some toward the end of the book as things start to happen in the actual timeline where the story lives. Not great, but not as bad as it seemed for like the first half.