While the central mystery is relatively well plotted, with always a bit of uncertainty at play. The character work is also not bad. What really didn’t work for me was how explicit and how bland the prose work is. It doesn’t respect the intelligence of the reader, reiterating what happened what just happened, granular explanations for things that don’t matter and thought processes. I know it’s commercial fiction but this was so annoying, especially coupled with some of the annoying dynamics between characters and how wind-up toy they feel when the plot begins to asset itself. The dialogue was also really not good.

I’m guessing the audiobook narrator only accentuated these issues, as she was fairly monotone and made the plotting more monotonous and every character sounded the same.