I kept meaning to start this, because I adore the Dark Jewels series, and I kept reading five pages or so and bouncing off. I want to state it is worth getting into the meat of the book, but it does take a bit longer to warm up than Dark Jewels does. 

The characters and their interactions tend to be the charm of Anne Bishop books for me, and this holds true here. It's funny and creepy and tense in quite a few places, and watching our naïve heroine accidentally befriend people is fun, even as you occasionally smack your hand to your head that she's missing things. She has good reason to, which helped mitigate any annoyance from that. 

Now that things are going and it seems like the plot for the full series (?) is starting to pick up, I'm interested to see where these go. 

I just didn't care enough to figure out the mystery.