Drawing on her experiences as both a former trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and an ex-assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Coates provides a searing first-hand account of injustice and ineptitude in the judicial system. Through a collection of engaging vignettes, she tracks her own growing disillusionment with how justice often is carried out. While she had high hopes when she became a prosecutor, she writes that her work put her at odds with her principles and her experience as a Black woman and caused her to question her own role in the criminal justice system. As she says, her stories sharply illustrate the problem of defining and achieving justice in the midst of this country's ongoing racial reckoning.