I'm kind of glad at the way it pulls together the previous ugliness of Kalinda's stories; it's always been Kalinda dealing with the ugliness while the other characters are untouched by it and finally it feels they're aiming for some kind of cohesion, I guess. Because they are working with dangerous people, convicted murders, life-or-death stakes, and somehow they remain totally disconnected from it.

This, yes; I feel this is it: Finally, something hits too close to home, but it is not the expected (Lamar Bishop taking revenge for being failed; crazy Colin Sweeney plotting a sweet dark murder) but the entirely unexpected and therefore completely, gruesomely realistic.

...but as I implied below, as someone disabled by brutal accidents that forever ended the life I'd known until then, I am bound to find more truth in this than others.