A review by louisealsford
The Guilty One by Lisa Ballantyne

4.0

The plot was a slow burner and didn’t particularly draw me in, but the characters made the book for me. Minnie the foster career turned adoptive Mam with a heart of gold and a painful past was my favourite, she felt so real and my heart was breaking for her by the end of the book. We didn’t need to hear her voice directly as a narrator to know exactly how she was feeling and understand why she did what she did. The book contains 2 storylines both told from the perspective of Daniel, in the 1980s the troubled son of a drug addict who is bounced around the care system getting in more and more trouble until Minnie sees something in him and takes him in. In the present day Daniel is all grown up and a criminal lawyer living in London and this storyline revolves around his involvement in the court case of Sebastian, an 11 year old boy charged with the murder of another child. In my opinion it’s a good mechanism for getting Daniel to examine his own past and not muchmore, Sebastian is an interesting character but I was far more invested in Daniel’s story. A few chapters written from Sebastian’s perspective would have helped daw me in to his story, but that’s beside the point because this is very much a book about Daniel. The parts of the story set in the past were the best bits for me.