First of all, this isn't Battle Mage Farmer 2.
This is all about Ellie the Witch.
It has even less farming than the last book, and has a lot more action.

Despite my grievances, I liked large parts of this book. It was better written, and stuff was better explained. You got a much better sense of the apocalypse system, and you really figure out whats going on with it (even if John doesn't). You also get a better image of who John is and just how impactful the history of the Eternal Flame. (He isn't your standard OP MC)

I liked this era of Ellie getting to know John and coming into her power.

But I almost feel like the book title is false advertisement, it has VERY little to do with farming. And book 2 even had a lot less slice-of-life elements than book 1. Book 1 was "OP MC trying to retire and getting interrupted", book 2 was chaotic and full of action and dangerous events.

I'll read book 3, but.. this was a disappointment.

There is a lot of things I enjoyed about this book. Top of which is that there isn't a glaringly obvious chief suspect, and that it's a dual-pov between the true-crime loving teen girl out to solve it all, and the brother of the chief-suspect of the last murder, and the potential main suspect of the newest missing girl.

I still guessed the main bad guy correctly, which is a little disappointing but my guess was more of an actual guess and not the eye-rolling stab-me-please-this-was-so-obvious that is the usual experience.

I also liked that the main character set out to solve all these crimes isn't some genius who sees the clues that everyone missed. No, she makes guesses, she has theories, but it's all educated guesses. She's still a teenage girl, and that means some of those educated guesses aren't exactly right. And that was refreshing.

I particularly enjoyed the ending where

Spoiler

the two main characters didn't even save the day and conquered evil. They.. got saved by the cops. I also kind of liked that it seemed like the cops was about to solve the case without meddling teenagers either way, they might have helped a little. But they also got in the way.

But I especially liked the secret at the end.

At around the 25% mark of this book, I considered dropping it. It was so obvious, I thought. I knew all the puzzle pieces, I thought.

But I decided to give the book another chance, I skipped a chapter of boring background story and suddenly a new piece was revealed that interested me. And suddenly I was invested again.

I liked how it at all ended, which wasn't where I thought it was actually going. It was a story of multiple parts of intrigue, but I hated the relationship between Winnie and Nigel and it ruined big parts of this book for me.

Still, I gossiped about it to my husband and that means it gains points in my book.