This short e-book is intended to take place between books one & two of Morrell’s mystery series about Thomas De Quincey. The e-book itself is around sixty pages, but after you take out several pages of pictures and a lengthy preview of the next book in the series, the actual story is only about thirty pages. It’s essentially just De Quincey telling a story about a tragedy that happened in the area where he grew up. It gets at something De Quincey himself talked about, which is the way it takes, not just an event, but an entire chain of them to bring us to where we are in our lives. He sees a chain of events that led to the circumstances that caused him to become an addict and muses on how simply any single link in that chain might have been different and it would have changed the entire outcome of his life. It’s an interesting idea, but this book doesn’t have much to recommend it. The prose is pretty flat and the central idea should probably have just been worked into one of the main books in the series. All in all, this short story is completely unnecessary and, though short, still kind of a waste of time. ½ star.
tl;dr – short story has a somewhat interesting premise, but it fails to really execute it in an interesting way; completely unnecessary and mostly uninteresting. ½ star.