First in his class and last in his noble line, Fabian Galloway’s only hope of a good future is passing his elite school’s honors class. It’s only offered to the best thirteen students, and those students have a single assignment: kill their professor.
If they succeed, their student debt is forgiven. However, if an assassination attempt fails or the professor is alive at the end of the year, the students’ lives are forfeit.
And dealing with the professor, a devil summoned solely to kill or be killed, is no easy task.
Fabian isn’t worried, though. He trusts his best friends—softhearted math genius Credence and absent-minded but insightful Euphemia—to help. After all, that’s why he befriended them.
As the months pass and their professor remains impossibly alive, the trio must use every asset they have to survive. Or else failure will be on their academic records—and their tombstones—forever.

‘That Devil, Ambition‘ got off to a ponderous start. The first ten per cent or so was spent explaining at length the details of the insanely lethal challenge the students of the honours class of this magic school face to graduate and have all of their loans forgiven. There was very little world-building and almost no character-building. The first part is told from Fabian’s point of view, which may explain its narrowness. He is, or he tells himself he is, a transactional person who will do whatever it takes to get himself and his two friends to graduate. I could find no reason to like him and few reasons to care what happens to him, although watching him compartmentalise his emotions and rationalise his behaviour as necessary rather than fundamentally wrong was unpleasant 

The story started to come alive once the rules of the challenge had been set. The friendship between the three main characters started to take shape. I could see how young all three of them were, how narrow their experience had been, how much pressure they were under, how much potential they had and how likely they were to die violently and soon. It wasn’t a good feeling. 

This is labelled as a Dark Academia novel and it does seem like it is the school rather than the Devil that the evil at the heart of this book is emanating from. The school has summoned a devil/demon to tutor the Honours class for their final year. To graduate, the students must kill the devil. If they attempt that and fail, the devil will kill them. If they don’t attempt it all, the devil will kill them. The question none of the students ask is ‘What does the school get out of this’. This seems a question all students should ask about their schools before sacrificing their energy and their time to them. 

As the story got into its stride the writing started to flow and I could see that the world the story takes place in was thoroughly imagined. The characters of the students were easy to believe in, although they were a little thin because they were seen through the undiscerning filter of Fabian’s transactional perspective. 

Yet, the better the writing became, the more i started to dislike this book. The situation was too like those horrible ‘SAW‘ movies that I could never bring myself to watch. What was being done to these children and what they were being made to do was repulsive. I couldn’t see a point to the setup unless I was meant to enjoy seeing young people being twisted into killers and or torn apart in front of those they love.

The premise of the book seemed cruel to me. The struggles of the main characters were pointless. The setup seemed like a deception they hadn’t yet realised they were caught up in. The violence, betrayal, venality and blindly ruthless ambition were so well drawn that they were hard to watch.

At thirty per cent, I decided to set the book aside. I’d wanted to carry on to part two of the book where the point of view shifts from Fabian to Credence, a more likeable character but I found myself persistently passing over this book and picking up another, so I listened to my distaste and decided to leave the book without knowing what happens next.