This book was better than Checkmate, don’t get me wrong, but it was still so far from realistic it killed me. I was mostly confused as to why I needed to read this as the ending for Checkmate left everything on good terms however, I now regret thinkin this and I am very glad that I have read it. The writing is perfect, it paints the scenes so well without adding words that don’t need to be there.

I hear this book was an afterthought anyway and this series was originally going to be the first three books which is how I choose to view them having read this. Gangs are endemic in poor urban areas but they also flouish in collapsing authoritarian societies and so are greatly apropos to Blackman's dystopian world. I waited months for it to come out, and read it in two days (which involved my English teacher threatening to convincate it because I stayed up to midnight reading XD).Despite the eventual happy ending, there is still the unintended consequence that thanks to his efforts, the crime empire is now united under the control of one man. I started reading this series a couple of years ago and only in the last month or so decided to pick the last 2 books up and actually finish a series for once. There were a few moments in all of the books which I did not particularly enjoy, I did not like Sephy at all in book one but as the series progressed I grew to like her, you see her growing up, changing, learning to love herself. Also if you're reading this review after having already read the previous three books in this series and you want to read this as it seems a few things from there may be resolved in this one, they aren't. Or was that supposed to be a cutesy angle: best friends in love with each other, who go straight from kissing to doing the down and dirty.

I hint at the was only because I first read her books, including the first three in this series when I was teenager (way way back) but I can't seem to get back into them as an adult. It is directly related to the prior books and is definitely worth a little extra effort to track down. Unfortunately, I didn't find that to be quite enough to hang the novel on, and my attention drifted between annoyance at the stupid choices one of the characters made, and impatience with the pace of the resolution. A story of love, friendship, sacrifice, revenge, criminal acts, danger and the discovery of what it’s possible to do when someone you love is hurt.In 2005 she was honoured with the Eleanor Farjeon Award in recognition of her contribution to children’s books, and in 2008 she received an OBE for her services to children’s literature. Blackman gets people, especially young adults, in all their tentativeness, determination and energy.