Book Review: ‘Hellsucks’ by Noel Sweeney

Hellsucks is a moving story about a young female lawyer named Zowie “Zogger” Darrow and her determination to bring to justice three men who set fire to and murder a defenseless pony.

Zogger, a lawyer in her mid-20s, is already disillusioned by her profession. She finds the cases that she’s being asked to take either trivial or insignificant, until she is assigned the case of Molly, a tortured pony. On the outside, Zogger is a tough, young lawyer—she is as smart as a whip and possesses a sharp tongue. When she is asked to represent Molly against the pony’s cold-hearted killers (already known to the law), she relates the pony’s story to her own story of being physically and sexually assaulted by a stranger in a park when she was a young girl.

Once Zogger becomes emotionally involved in the case, she makes it her mission to see to it that the defendants pay for their vulgar crime. She is determined to win this case more than any other case she has ever been involved in, putting all her rage and emotion into preparing the case, while making a silent commitment to Molly that her abusers will rot in jail for their barbaric and despicable act.

With the courtroom as a backdrop, Zogger must fight through indifference and injustice as corruption rears its ugly head. Because of its serious and confrontational nature, Hellsucks is a painful story at times. The book makes a convincing case as to what drives Zogger to become a heroic vigilante in the face of an unsympathetic legal system.

Noel Sweeney is a criminal lawyer who specializes in animal rights, and this gripping novel will have readers rooting for Zogger in her unbending quest to seek justice for all beings.

Posted by Samantha Pulsford