I found several reviews that criticized the first half of the book for being slow and dull before picking up at the second half - but it was actually the exact opposite for me. I absolutely devoured the first 200 pages! There was this mystery I could sink my teeth into, this sinister overtone with the unknown dropped calls and a threatening text, and the desire to know more. Who is Eddie? Why did he disappear? What happened? Oh, the urge to look ahead was so strong and kept me going!

Unfortunately, the second half... the mystery is resolved with a good portion of the book still left. Granted, the initial plot twist did catch me by surprise, I personally did not see it coming, though it certainly left me with some more questions - but from that point on, about perhaps 150 pages left and it just seems to become a whole different book, a whole new vibe. There seemed a rush to get this couple from this point and to their Happily Ever After, and it was packed with twists and herrings that felt arbitrary, explanations for earlier mysteries that felt anticlimactic, and all in all... just a little unnecessary.

I don’t really know what ending I had hoped for or expected, but I had such a good time with the thriller portion of the book and had such difficulty with the whole standard romance of the ending. Plus there are a number of side characters and every single one of them gets their own personal drama on top of it, which I imagine was the author’s method of humanizing them and fleshing them out, or perhaps a way of making clear that everybody does have something going on and sometimes they all happen at once and not when convenient? but ultimately resulted in a bunch of background cardboard and a lot of knotted threads that didn’t really need to be there, none of it tied to the main story in any way, they were JUST random background plot points.

Overall I didn’t haaate the book or even necessarily the ending, though I was let down by it. It just starts off built up as one thing and turns drastically into another.

Incredibly dull. Nothing happens. Everyone is just there while the rest of the world turns, no real contribution to the events. There’s nothing to get invested in- no strong characters, no complex dynamics, even major turning points seemed glossed over at best. Just was a very shallow telling of the Iliad from a cardboard perspective. It was broken into three parts and I ultimately skimmed the last third just to finally get it over with as soon as possible. I was so bored.

So... going in, I expected this to be gratuitous M/M porn with a dash of detective mystery set in early 20th century British countryside - and I am for all of these things!

And... I mean... I guess technically that’s exactly what it is?

It’s pretty much just your standard porn that wanted to pretend to have a plotline, which can be okay if you’re into general cheesy porn plots where everyone is inexplicably gay and whipping their junk out within seconds of meeting - but in my opinion, it’s not even well done porn. It’s laughingly, appallingly bad. I read with a nervous laugh and a perpetual sense of secondhand embarrassment.

It’s the kind of bad that I can laugh at though and not the kind that makes me mad, so maybe two stars? 1.5? I don’t even know how to grade it. I’m not even entirely convinced that this book isn’t SUPPOSED to be bad. But even if I try to go at this as a book that’s supposed to JUST be smut, it’s still not that good; the sex scenes, of which there were MANY, happen with such frequency and wham bam efficiency that none of them are particularly that exciting or attractive, in my opinion.