Well… I finished it. Barely.
I really wanted to like Racing the Devil. I’m a sucker for a good historical mystery, and Inspector Ian Rutledge sounded like my kind of character: a haunted war veteran, sharp investigator, a man weighed down by his past. It all sounded great on paper. Unfortunately, that’s exactly where it stayed—on paper. For me, the story never really came alive.
The biggest problem? The pacing. This book dragged. I’m talking “put it down and forget where you left it” slow. It took me days to get through, instead of the usual hours. There were multiple times I set it aside, fully intending not to pick it up again… until I remembered how much I paid for it. (Thanks, guilt.)
By the time things finally picked up—around page 300 out of 340—it was too little, too late. The ending wasn’t bad, but it couldn’t make up for the slog it took to get there. I never felt truly invested in the characters or the mystery, and that made it hard to care how it all wrapped up.
On the plus side, Rutledge definitely checks off my “strong, lone-wolf with a past” trope. He’s isolated, haunted, stubborn—the whole package. But even that wasn’t enough to carry the story for me this time.
In the end, Racing the Devil just wasn’t for me. 1 out of 5 stars.
