Who Is The Protagonist In Beneath Devil’S Bridge (Spoilers)?

This book absolutely blindsided my expectations in the best way — I went in thinking the podcaster would be the driving engine, but by the time I closed 'Beneath Devil's Bridge' I felt like the story had quietly handed the central torch to someone else. The novel opens with Trinity Scott, the ambitious true-crime podcaster whose interviews with convicted Clayton Jay Pelley pull the case back into the public eye, and that breathing, modern podcast frame is what makes the beginning feel current and cinematic. The author’s blurbs and promotional copy lean into Trinity as the hook, so it’s a clever misdirect that nudges readers to assume she’s the protagonist while the deeper emotional gravity belongs to another character. What really anchors the story, for me, is Rachel Walczak — the retired detective who originally put Pelley behind bars. The book steadily shifts perspective and responsibility onto Rachel: her past choices, the evidence she carried (and perhaps shelved), and the moral fallout she lives with become the novel’s beating heart. Reviews and reader reactions picked up on that pivot too, noting that while Trinity propels the plot forward with podcast episodes and interviews, Rachel’s internal reckoning is the true throughline, and the one that carries the biggest emotional and ethical weight. That revelation — that the investigator herself is at the center of the book’s real conflict — is a spoiler worth flagging because it reframes how you interpret motives, secrets, and who the narrative treats as the story’s human center. I’ll add that Clayton Jay Pelley and the murdered teen Leena Rai are essential to the plot’s machinery, but they function more as the catalytic echoes that force Rachel (and Trinity) to face inconvenient truths. If you’re after a classic single-person hero’s-journey, this one surprises: it’s more of a slow unspooling of a moral landscape where Rachel ends up carrying the protagonist’s arc — not necessarily because she’s the loudest presence, but because the novel asks us to live inside her consequences. That lingering, uncomfortable focus on the detective’s compromises stuck with me long after the last page.