I found this book difficult to rate because it’s one of those novels that I’m not sure you’d enjoy. It being well written and the structure unique, it’s satisfying in some ways. But the characters, including the narrator of the story, are so unlikeable and occupy a world without consequence, that it becomes infuriating. It’s almost like hate reading something. Almost.

The story is about the sordid affairs of two intensely rich couples who’s casual relationship vacationing together become entangled in a web of intrigue that sets them on a path of madness, sex, and death. The narrator tells the story in a meandering way as though he’s putting the pieces together himself even as it becomes clear he’s a participant.

The structure of the book signals this often. He begins telling you of the people and then mentions a detail that seems innocuous but as he circles back to the actual event later on, paints it in a different light. The near constant obfuscation, I think, points to the narrator being a sociopath and a narcissist. It’s important to him that the reader get “the right idea” about himself and Edward when they are both toxic partners and wouldn’t know intimacy as it was occurring.

What was brilliant about it was the way in which it truly sets the rich and the aristocracy apart as a desperate, vile separate species. Their world is not enticing in the least because they do not possess humanity. Ironically, the whole text in of itself is the narrator attempting to convince the reader of his own and others humanity while washing his hands clean of any wrong doing in the tale.

It is highly effective in endearing the reader to the tale with its contempt for the rich and the unreliable nature of the tale makes the reader hunt and peck for truth between details that cross cross as the narrator returns to events multiple times. That particular part of the structure makes it quite annoying sometimes and won’t be for everybody. Especially when it becomes clear he could not have known all of these things. So what is actually true and what is not?

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.