On a Saturday in May Issy Castillo is writing a letter of recommendation for a student. She only started the job earlier that month so can’t know the student very well. In any case, she hasn’t learned to set boundaries yet. She gets a phone call from a department friend to meet up for a bite to eat. When she gets to his office, she finds him lying on the floor. Three other people stop at the office — why are all these people at the faculty building on a Saturday? — and immediately start accussing Issy of murder. Without making the slightest attempt at finding out what is going on.

The story then moves back a few weeks to when Issy first arrived at the department. Several people are openly hostile towards her and she assigned an office in the basement — rather than given the office of her predecessor. The atmosophere in the department is decidedly toxic. At a party departmental reorganisation (including laying off people) is discussed and Issy finds two dead scorpions tacked to her door (which she doesn’t report to the department.)
This glimpse into the past shows there are many people with a grudge against Eddy, the soon to be victim.

I wanted to like this story, but I didn’t. The writing is on the one hand simplistic and many characters are characatures. On the other too much attention is given to detail when describing action or scenes. At one point, Eddy and Issy are talking in the car and after every few sentences of dialogue there is some desciption of car driving action or leaving the car and continue to walk. In that scene a conversation that can’t have been more than a minute is stretched out over ten. That just reads awkward: must I imagine the two characters have really long pauses between eveything they say?

I also didn’t particularly care for the scenes with Doña Isabella. She died long before New Mexico joined the federation, yet speaks modern slang; she could have chosen any embodiment, yet prefers to be an old woman. I can only think this is to keep with the wise old woman characature.

The author may concider getting a sensitivity reader to prevent being unintentionally offensive.

I read an ARC through NetGalley.