This book felt like it was more about the author proving his own cleverness, explaining the perfect crimes in perfect detail, than it was about telling a good story. It would have made a funny short story. At novel length, it gave me a lot of time as a reader to pull on threads. Under a close reading, things quickly began to unravel.

Holmes never fully leaned into the macabre and the satire. The bad guys had to be completely irredeemable. The deletists had to be good people. We had to be told with the same overly academic heavy-handedness that these deaths are ethical! This didn't give the reader any room to be uncomfortable and seriously ponder the ethics of extrajudicial murder. It also made the book less fun and silly than it could have been.

The entire book is expositive. It made it difficult as a reader to emotionally relate to any of the characters.

McMasters is an absolutely bananas, nonsense place with bananas, nonsense rules. This could have been cool - but once again, Holmes kept telling us 'no no it makes perfect sense.' It does not, and that sort of disconnect was really frustrating as a reader. I'm down to read about and accept nonsense. Asking me to accept why nonsense rules are actually rational just made me bristle.

We follow three deletists and I kept wondering - why these three? I kept waiting for some artful connection at the end. Cliff and Gemma reconnect in a campy, unearned, and frankly jarring happy ever after. Doria's story never reconnects to Cliff and Gemma's after leaving McMasters. Her story was the most interesting AND the most problematic.

I generally don't give books below 2 stars unless they really piss me off - but Doria Maye's method of deletion was awful. Apparently it was evil for Fiedler to plant Communist Party pamphlets with Cliff's work documents but copacetic for Doria to lean into 1950s trans panic.

Doria makes it appear as though a man dressed as a woman murdered Leo Kosta. To really sell this lie she uses another person's actual DNA - effectively framing someone innocent. Despite McMasters being about deletions not harming anyone innocent, Doria's modus operandi harms the specific human whose DNA she plants at the crime scene and an entire marginalized community.

I just don't know how you can spend the entire book bleating on about how moral all these murders are . . . and then pin the blame on a queer boogeyman? I get that within the 1950s setting this would have worked and I guess? been shocking? clever? But framing a marginalized community (AND AN ACTUAL INNOCENT INDIVIDUAL BECAUSE DNA YO) does not abide by Rule #3. What innocent person might suffer by your actions? Guy McMasters asks. The answer: A lot of innocent persons. We just don't care about them.

I know some folks out there may play devil's advocate and say, 'well maybe Holmes wanted the reader to be critical of Doria's method of deletion . . .' Then why spend so much time going over the McMaster's rule of mitigating harm to others and setting up our three deletists as good people acting ethically? Why didn't the McMaster's board permanently expel Doria the same way they did to Jud Helkampf? Isn't letting Doria live and hint at murdering again kind of implicit approval of the way she chose to go about deleting Leonid Kosta?? What does it say that they gave Gemma a second chance for saving an awful person merely because the awful person was pregnant? We care more about a fetus than we do about queer people??? You can't have it both ways.
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