Part murder mystery, part romance, part thought experiment. I enjoyed this quite a bit. It’s an interesting idea, this privately owned and isolated town meant for victims.

What corruption looks like and what group dynamics look like with the setup make the setting novel, at least to me, but I haven’t read many crime novels; especially not Canadian murder mysteries, which seem to be a big market up here that I wasn’t aware of at all.

The cast of characters felt well developed and well written but it is just very refreshing to read a woman writing well developed female characters. There’s some male authors who do it well but I always find a marked difference and this is no different. The narrative allows for the author to subvert a lot of tropes and it makes the murder mystery particularly interesting and twisty, I found.

The only drawback for me was that there’s so much going on with the first novel in the series that some of the more interesting stuff you’d like to be expounded upon doesn’t, simply because there’s no time for it between the setup, arrival of town, the murder mystery and establishing the cast and developing them enough that they don’t feel like they don’t matter enough to consider them in the murder.

It’s a page turner and I got hooked fast. Definitely going to continue with the series and hope more of the town and residents and the threads of corruption and what not get even more developed.