Synopsis:
Chance Cormac faces a personal and professional crisis as he loses faith in the law and himself. He abandons his practice and life in Brooklyn to volunteer to represent illegally detained immigrants throughout the country. From the federal courts to the infamous CECOT prison in El Salvador, against all odds, Chance struggles to rescue a client who is imprisoned without any hope of escape. While Chance pursues justice, his former paralegal and first love Sally McConnell, is forced to confront her husband’s cancer and the cyberbullying of her daughter Melody by a student in her high school. Chance must regain his faith in order to save those who need him most and himself.
Favorite Lines:
“A cut can’t heal if you keep taking the bandage off.”
“It’s not magic, Chance, it’s diplomacy”
“The solitude and calmness have permitted me to look in, not out.”
My Opinion:
I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for my honest opinion.
This book feels like it’s juggling a lot. Legal drama, spiritual awakening, political commentary, personal redemption arc… and somehow it works.
At the center is Chance Cormac, who is not exactly subtle as a protagonist. He’s a lawyer, a bit of a crusader, a bit of a mess, and very clearly someone the story wants you to see as both flawed and morally grounded. You meet him already carrying a lot—loss, burnout, disillusionment with the legal system—and the book just keeps stacking things on top of that.
The plot moves in a way that feels almost episodic at times. One minute you’re in a courtroom dealing with immigration law and media chaos, the next you’re inside a prison that reads like something out of a dystopian novel, and then suddenly you’re on a pilgrimage walking through monasteries and reflecting on faith.
That shift shouldn’t work as well as it does, but there’s a through-line: Chance trying to figure out what any of it means. Not just justice in a legal sense, but justice in a human sense. And more than that, whether any of it actually matters in the long run.
The prison sections are where the book hits hardest. They’re not subtle, but they’re effective. The conditions are brutal, and the message is clear: systems fail people, and sometimes they do it in ways that feel almost impossible to fix. There’s a rawness there that cuts through the more philosophical parts of the story.
At the same time, the book doesn’t stay in that darkness for too long without pulling back into something more reflective. The spiritual elements aren’t just background noise—they’re baked into the story. Near-death experiences, questions of faith, purpose, second chances… it all leans pretty heavily into the idea that suffering is supposed to mean something.
Where the book really lands, though, is in its quieter moments. Conversations with Melody, the way grief shows up in small, ordinary interactions, the exhaustion that comes from trying to keep doing the “right thing” when it doesn’t seem to change anything.
By the end, it leans hard into redemption. Not in a clean, tied-up way, but in a “keep going anyway” kind of way. There’s loss, there’s some resolution, and there’s this underlying suggestion that maybe the point isn’t winning—it’s continuing to show up.
Summary:
Overall, this is a layered, sometimes messy mix of legal drama, social commentary, and spiritual reflection centered on a burned-out lawyer trying to do the right thing in a system that often doesn’t reward it. Readers who enjoy character-driven legal fictions may enjoy this book. Happy reading!
Check out Against All Odds here!
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