A huge thank you to the author, NetGalley, and Orbit Books for providing this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book starts off with a bang. It’s hilarious and the first chapter absolutely made me want to continue. I was intrigued from the first page and had really high hopes - but it just never grabbed me or kept me captivated.

The best way I can describe the disconnect in this book, is it feels like a book in the middle of a series. It feels like I should already know some of these characters and their investigations, and not that this is the first introduction to them. We meet Isolde (Iz) and Warren (War) but so much of their “investigation” is simply “ask person A - (brief background about person A) - Person A decides they like them - answer” and then rinse and repeat. It REALLY feels like this book is taking place in an already established world, and that I should already have a basis for what’s going on. The fact that I don’t really made reading this book difficult for me. (I even double-checked that I wasn’t amiss in my understanding that this was a new series, and not a continuation, I felt so lost the entire time.)

For a mystery novel about private investigators, there honestly was little actually investigating going on, to be honest. A good portion of this book felt like reading a walking simulator where you’ve already done all the side-quests so when you talk to the person they ONLY give you plot relevant information. The issue is, we (the reader) have not seen these side-quests but instead we’re briefly told about them as if we should already know. This kind of makes the stakes never feel relevant when we’re reading, nor does it give adequate background on the main characters or the person/creature they’re talking to - it just makes the entire thing feel pointless to read.

The writing is whimsical, and the world is interesting, but sometimes it felt like things were added simply to BE whimsical, and not because they were needed in the story. The dragon in the bag was only there for either a deus ex machina save, or to occasionally make funny quips and I felt nothing would have been lost if it was removed. The issue is that there are multiple instances of either something happening or a character that could also be described in a similar way. Personally, at no point did I feel that something was both plot relevant and necessary, and never not that it was mostly added forshock or humor value.

It’s hard to describe, but I think this book would have been more fun to read if Iz and War were already characters we cared about, and not where this was supposed to be our first introduction to them. This book would have worked as the third or fourth in a series of their investigations, where you technically don’t have to read them in order but when stuff is mentioned you can go “oh I remember that happening in the last book!” rather than it feeling like pointless info-dumping to make you care about something you’ve never read about.

The twist ending at the end didn’t really make me interested in continuing, instead it kind of made me feel like everything I just read for the past hundred pages was pointless? Which is NOT the feeling I should have with a twist ending for a mystery novel - but instead it kind of felt less like it was finishing up the plot in this book and setting up the next, but instead it was making everything that happened in this book pointless and then never actually solves the issue it starts with.

I feel bad that I didn’t enjoy this novel, especially as I can see I’m in the minority for this. I think you should still check out this book, because it was never bad or poorly written, and it does have a lot of funny moments, it just never clicked for me as I read it.