The Best Bad Things

There is a lot to get delightfully worked up over in this book. Alma Rosales is a practiced shapeshifter. The right cap and clothes and she's a rough and tumble man, the right accent and she's a simpering maid from the Highlands. She's been a detective for the Pinkerton's, a pick pocket scraping by, and now an undercover operative trying to fix a leak in her boss' smuggling supply chain. In the process, she romances a beautiful forger named Nell, and lusts after the local boss, Nathaniel Wheeler. Alma has an absurd amount of chemistry with both of them, and despite her selfishness and claims to only be interested in blood and sex, a knack for detail. It's that detail that kind of bogs down this book, and the excess that the title promises never really makes up for it.

I was really struggling with how to rate this. I have seen criticism of how many of us will “round down” our ratings, when generally that's not a thing you do with numbers. The way I see it, its more of fulfilling a criteria. If a book satisfies a three-star criteria (that is, enjoyable most of the way through, but either not exceptional or has some distracting black marks), but not a four-star criteria (all around really good, just won't be running around town telling everyone to read it), then its not a four star book, I'm sorry. And this book bounced way up a few times as the pacing would intensify, only to lose its momentum completely.

But I was really torn. I like Alma as a character, but I also find her a little uninspired. I found all the ways Carrasco portrayed Alma's hedonism and violence to be rather predictable. She hits on everything that moves, she's turned on by boxing matches, and loves her sweets. The fact that these character elements are a little unoriginal should not be a problem (I will be the first to tell you that originality is a myth and discrediting something based on its resemblance to something else is a stupid way to critique), but I kind of feel like that was all Alma was. Fists and fucking. She wanted Nell because she wanted her, and while they have some lovely scenes, Nell never really gets under her skin the way I wanted her too. Neither does Wheeler, though he certainly tries. The entire novel Alma is wearing a mask - one that she finds she's extremely comfortable in - but the complexities of her gender are never considered, not overtly anyway. Likewise, her ethnicity is also considered only in brief flashing moments. I think the strongest character moment was when Alma tells Nell her father was Mexican. “You don't look it,” Nell says, to which Alma bristles because she looks just like her father, especially when dressed as a man. There was a lot going on that moment, but its never followed up on.

That's a thing that I began to notice by the end of this book. There are a lot of characters and Alma creates the beginnings of emotional ties with several of them, but they're sadly left hanging. Alma's character arc is a shallow one that doesn't go very far, and things like considering the consequences of her actions or reconsidering her coping mechanisms - things that would have allowed Alma to grow - never really happen. She's more or less the same by the end of the book, with little introspection, and little she feels she has to answer for.

With all that said, there is a lot of fun to be had here. Alma's dynamic with Wheeler is red hot the whole way through - where she's chaos and violence, he's slick and precise. The relationship with Nell is also sweet, but again there is a feeling like it isn't really going anywhere. (Though Alma's stamina in hopping from Nell to Wheeler oftentimes within the same day kind of blows my mind). Many of the characters - Wheeler, Delphine, even Sloane - are exceptionally well drawn. And when Alma's gambit was finally revealed, I wasn't exactly blown away, but I couldn't help but smile and think “I knew she was up to something.”

I kind of regret listening to the audiobook for this one. For one, the strategic machinations of Alma's opium trader world are difficult to keep track of when you're only listening to it. And two, you're listening to a female narrator not only speak in the voice of a woman pretending to be a man for most of the book, but most of the people she interacts with are men. So aside from two other women - Nell and Delphine - its a female voice feigning a symphony of low and gravelly voices, and if you find that kind of thing a bit silly to listen to after a while, I would not recommend listening to this one. Though I did rather love it whenever the narrator did Wheeler's Scottish accent.

Overall, I think this book is trying to be more fun and sexy than it actually is. It feels like grit for grit's sake, but with little substance behind it. If you like that kind of thing, along with labyrinthine plots and politics about what it was like to smuggle opium in the Pacific Northwest in the 1920s, then this might be for you. The Best Bad Things wants to rejoice in its excess, but for me none of it ever felt like enough.