Astrid Hawk
Read for April 2026 First Reads. This book was a mess from start to finish. The writing is comically childish, there is no sense of individual character voice (even though it's ostensibly told from 3 character POVs, they all mostly sound the same, and each character's chapters include thoughts from other characters so it starts to get confusing who we're supposed to be following when), and the attention to detail is incredibly uneven, to put it mildly, with the insertion of seeming random small details that do nothing to enhance the atmosphere or sense of time and place, only to be very abruptly followed by an outline-level description of events.
The story itself jumps incoherently from event to event and place to place with only a loose sense of a central plot tying them together. The book is incorrectly labelled a mystery/thriller - although there is a murder and the killer is unknown throughout the book, there is no sense of thrill, anticipation, or even puzzle-solving. The characters just go about their lives, thinking about how unfair their lot in life is for being stupidly rich and thus in the limelight. There is some incredibly clumsy blackmail that fails to feel sinister due to how comically exaggerated it is. When the killer is revealed, about 3/4 of the way through the book, it is done abruptly, with no preamble, and feels like an afterthought. There is no discussion about how the conclusion was drawn - no piecing together clues. While it's clear that the author is trying to build a mystery using several unreliable narrators, what actually happens is that she simply tells several completely different stories, never bothering to stitch the plot holes together to make it plausible that each narrator simply saw things differently. By the time the "mystery" is "solved", there have been other events that have superseded the importance of the original murder, furthering the feeling that the "reveal" is an afterthought.
I wasted my time reading this even though it was free. Don't waste yours.
Read for April 2026 First Reads. This book was a mess from start to finish. The writing is comically childish, there is no sense of individual character voice (even though it's ostensibly told from 3 character POVs, they all mostly sound the same, and each character's chapters include thoughts from other characters so it starts to get confusing who we're supposed to be following when), and the attention to detail is incredibly uneven, to put it mildly, with the insertion of seeming random small details that do nothing to enhance the atmosphere or sense of time and place, only to be very abruptly followed by an outline-level description of events.
The story itself jumps incoherently from event to event and place to place with only a loose sense of a central plot tying them together. The book is incorrectly labelled a mystery/thriller - although there is a murder and the killer is unknown throughout the book, there is no sense of thrill, anticipation, or even puzzle-solving. The characters just go about their lives, thinking about how unfair their lot in life is for being stupidly rich and thus in the limelight. There is some incredibly clumsy blackmail that fails to feel sinister due to how comically exaggerated it is. When the killer is revealed, about 3/4 of the way through the book, it is done abruptly, with no preamble, and feels like an afterthought. There is no discussion about how the conclusion was drawn - no piecing together clues. While it's clear that the author is trying to build a mystery using several unreliable narrators, what actually happens is that she simply tells several completely different stories, never bothering to stitch the plot holes together to make it plausible that each narrator simply saw things differently. By the time the "mystery" is "solved", there have been other events that have superseded the importance of the original murder, furthering the feeling that the "reveal" is an afterthought.
I wasted my time reading this even though it was free. Don't waste yours.