The exploration of grief and coming to accept their sons for who they were was a really strong aspect of this book and easily the best written. In fact the exploration of the themes of racism and homophobia is some of the best I've seen recently because of how raw and real it felt. Considering how much it's talked about between the characters, it very rarely felt preachy or like the author was lecturing you through the page which is a really good thing.

Plenty of very, very gory violence (like seriously, if you hate gore maybe skip this one) which I just don't really care about positively or negatively, though it did feel it took up more page space than it should have.

I had some issues with the writing, mostly just because there were a lot of unnecessary words and sentences on the page (i.e. over describing inconsequential actions) that killed the flow every now an again. The style was mostly fine, you just have to get your head attuned to the dialect and then it's pretty easy to read. Some of the slang can make some sections a bit hard to parse but at least it's true to the characters.

It got a bit meandering at times and I considered DNFing at about the 50% mark because it felt like it was dragging its heels and that's one of the main reasons I can't rate it higher than a three. For a reasonably short book I'm honestly surprised at how slow paced it felt, which for a mystery thriller I think is not a great thing and certainly not what I was expecting going in.