The Next Time I Die (A Hard Case Crime Book)

Steven Blitz is a hot-shot defense attorney with an emotionally unstable wife. When his wife kicks him out of the house, he attempts to do the noble thing and break up a domestic disturbance at a gas station when he is stabbed in the gut; when he wakes up in the hospital, the world around him has changed, and he no longer knows what is real. Blitz must work out to find the answers to this new reality, a reality where there is no 9/11 or Netflix, and Blitz is not a very nice man. This book initially felt a bit like the old Twilight Zone series where an individual wakes up in a world kind of like their own, but different, mixed with some crime noir thrown in. It is generally a fast read, but Blitz gets on the readers’ nerves, and it is not easy to cheer for him to find a way back. There are too many pages of him trying to convince everyone that this is a dream, and his quest to put away someone who may or may not be a killer seems far-fetched and page-consuming. Overall fairly uneven from start to finish.