This took me forever to finish. I just couldn’t get into it, mainly because of the writing style. I didn’t realize it was a series and hadn’t read anything else that came before it. You can’t pick this up and be immediately immersed in the world without the other books the way you can with other series. It’s heavy on dialogue and very light on description of characters and their relationship to the main character. It felt like a constant rotation of names with very surface level background information. Even if I had started from book one, I don’t know if I would have been into this series. It reads like a script for a TV crime procedural because it’s so dialogue heavy. I love a crime show, but in a book form this was lacking in the world building I’d need to feel immersed and invested.

The way the twist came out also felt thrown together. All of a sudden they just instantly know who it is in the middle of a conversation where the witness gave no identifying info. I found myself turning back the pages to figure out how they came to that conclusion because the whole “he gave us a false clue” thing really felt like a haphazard explanation. As a reader, I always felt like I was having a hard time following the detective’s thinking. Every so often she’d have a “it must be this moment” that had a very lackluster “because of” to follow that the previous parts of the story doesn’t really set up well.

In general I’m pretty surprised the reviews are so high. Maybe reading more of the series would make me feel differently, but I doubt it. A book should be able to stand on its own enough to make me want to go back and read more if I pick it up not knowing it’s a series. Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series is a good example of that. I’d unknowingly started with book 13 and went back and started from book 1 because I loved it so much.

The character building was just so lackluster here that it didn’t make me want to go back to older books to read more. I just felt so completely disconnected from the characters and world that it made me acutely aware that I was reading instead of getting lost in the story. Overall, one of my least favorite reads this year.

I’ve read up to book 35 in this series and the odd one after that (I’m working my way through a full re-read) so I don’t know if I have missed anyway some slight changes in format before this one. I was surprised that Roarke didn’t show up until a full quarter of the way through and after that took quite a backseat in proceedings. There was a little bit of his technical wizardry but otherwise he felt more of a secondary character in this one.

That’s not a bad thing though. I enjoyed seeing the team work as a team without too much reliance on his IT skills and also a more prominent role of Jenkinson & Reineke and some of the other crime lab staff. They may have been in quite a bit before but I’ve yet to get to that in my re-read. So that was quite a nice little change of pace & keeps the series fresh.

Eve is on the hunt for someone who has killed and also abducted 2 others so it’s a race against time to find him/her before anything happens to the women. She’s also trying to track down a women from 50 years earlier with no name and only a tattoo to identify her. Yeah good luck with that. But if you’ve read the books, you know the team skills and nothing is impossible. Plenty of twists and turns as you’d expect and I think I missed a plot point somewhere so the end result took me by surprise (I’ll be extra vigilant on my re-read!). I love this series, it’s one of my favourites and this one doesn’t disappoint