People from my bookclub who saw this review before we met: no you didn't.

Things that reduced my enjoyment of the book:

- adding random bits of dialogue in another language to better establish setting always bothers me. Blatant mistakes in that language that should have been caught by the editor bothered me more.
- some things didn't make sense to me. Mild spoiler ahead: our main detective gets suspended for a week, gun and badge pulled and then just...continues to investigate?? Goes to the funeral of the victim?? What???
- similarly, there were some narrative inconsistencies. sometimes I'd think characters were in one room but then suddenly they were in another.
- Nichol's character and the way others treated her genuine attempts at doing a Good Job gave me ridiculous anxiety.
- many characters are caricatures of themselves and do some truly irrational things. Yolande in particular is just... Confusing.
- the resolution ultimately made very little sense, to the point where there were paragraphs telling us, the reader, that there are definitely people in the world who would kill over this and like this.

And finally, my biggest problem with this is that the book is supposedly under 300 pages. And yet it felt so much longer and I kept losing interest. I'm glad to be free of it.

If you're looking for a cozy mystery, I recommend picking up some Agatha Christie instead.

More thoughts here: https://youtu.be/iNUD3wZlu7w