I didn’t finish this book. Conceptually, it had loads of potential. I will admit that in the first two chapters, the characters made me chuckle, and I liked the premise. Then everything went seriously wrong, but I’m willing to admit it may be the kind of reader I am, and that I am not the intended audience.

This book has one heck of a jumpy narrative. It's all over the place. By page 100, there are probably 20 characters I'm supposed to keep track of in some kind of detail. There's sort of one MC, but there are really 4 or 5 MCs, and I don't have anything invested in any of them because everything I know about them is so shallow. It’s possible the problem for me was I wanted to relax with this book. And the writing style does lend itself to that vibe at times (but not all the time!) But the mental energy it took to keep track of everyone didn’t mesh with me.

I have no idea how this murder mystery pans out, but I can tell you the lead-up to this murder irritated me, despite not hating the writing style. It so blatantly points to the death of one person (literally saying things like, "He knew Bobby wanted to kill him, but at least for now he is still alive after their meeting") that clearly said person wasn't going to die right off the bat. Then the person that does die leaves only one plausible suspect, and unless Osman has no imagination at all, it's likely not that person.

My problem with this is that the murder (and subsequent mystery) doesn't really feel like the point of the book. It feels like a bait-and-switch. Which, if I'm honest, wouldn't have been so bad if there were fewer characters whom I could really get attached to. From what I gleaned, some of these characters would have been absolutely wonderful to hang out with (even if one is the killer! It’s not like they were after me!).

The real DNF factor for me is the disjointed writing. If you're going to have that many characters and lean into a character-driven story, don't make it more confusing by sliding in and out between third person and first person, and for the love of all things good and right with the world, don't do that AND occasionally use past tense, then present tense, then immediate present tense, or whatever tense mash-up this book uses. I probably have my tenses wrong. It doesn't matter. At times it was actually unpleasant to read, and even after 100 pages, I still found it jarring. Still, within those pages, there were glimmers of great writing, which is why I held out as long as I did before putting it in the DNF pile.

Don’t get me wrong. I know I may be an outlier, here. This book has a ton of love from critics and readers. Maybe for me it was simply a case of wrong time, wrong place for the book. I don’t plan on revisiting it anytime soon, but if you’re more into in-depth character charting than I am, and don’t mind the POV/tense switching, then you may have a very different experience than I did.

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Created Feb 26, 2024 at 6:41pm • Submit your own review...