veronica reads.

F | This book deserves zero stars. If I could just give it a zero in every review site I can, I honestly would just to warn people to not waste their time on this terrible novel that masquerades itself as a crime/mystery novel. It was bad from start to finish and I can't believe I actually wasted my time on this.

It takes a lot for a book to piss me off. It takes a lot for me to actually despise it. Even though I tend to rant on about the honest to Jesus horrible Sisi books by Allison Pataki, it had its charming moments in the first novel. If I hadn't read two biographies about Sisi by the time I read the book, it might not have pissed me off because I wouldn't have had the body of knowledge to know just how much Allison Pataki was disrespecting Sisi.

This book? Nah yo. This has officially claimed the title of my “Most Disliked Book”.

I don't even know where to begin because there is just so much I need to discuss. I guess the easy part?

The worldbuilding was nonexistent. I couldn't understand this world aside from people wear “masques” (Lord even the spelling makes my eyes roll – like no it doesn't make things cooler) to hide their imperfections and things like that and that there's this hierarchy where legacies can pretty much do whatever the fuck they want and if you're an under well god forbid you're an under.

I didn't understand how these masques worked and because I didn't understand how they worked, I was quite honestly imagining them to look like robotic faces. Or something from Doctor Who.

Another thing is I don't get what universe this is set in. Is it another planet? Earth in the future? What? How about the name of the city? The country? How does this world work? None of this was established! How are is anyone supposed to immerse themselves in a universe that we can't even understand? It makes me question if the author understands it. Hell, I even got up to a point in the book when I wondered if these characters were human!

One thing I did understand in this universe is that people fall in love fast and have sex a lot. Now, I don't mind sex in books, regardless of whether or not they're classified as romance novels or not and it is in the trigger warnings that there’s sex. However, what sort of “crime/mystery” novel spends more time on characters having sex and lusting after each other than on actually solving the crime?

In the 100 chapters of this novel, I think about 75 of them had sex scenes or mentioned sex. This would be cool and all but where is the mystery? Where is the solving crime aspect of this book? It certainly didn't help that POVs changed every chapter and each chapter was short so whatever sliver of mystery/crime solving we got was too short.

But Lord, these characters are just so vapid, shallow, dumb and self-centred that every POV change felt refreshing until I remembered this character is just as bad as the previous one. The only character I enjoyed was Saam but even she got cringe-worthy when she got together with Severy. If they all died in some fiery explosion at the end or because their fancy B&V masques electrocuted them, I wouldn’t care. I’d just laugh it off because that would have been a far more satisfying ending than the one we actually got.

So the main arc of this story is solving the murder case, right? Yet it didn't feel like it because we spent more time jumping between characters who were too busy contemplating how badly they wanted to have sex with another character and worrying about themselves. These characters had their stories, fine. But the problem is that there was too much going on and that rather than condense it, Lipkin decided that the answer was to add as many sex scenes as possible to distract readers from the fact that her characters are all shallow and dumb, that this plot is a jumbled mess, and that she didn't do any sort of research.

I think that what truly highlighted how bad this book is was the fact that there was no action. We weren't there to witness a lot of the things that we should have been a witness. Everything is told after the fact. I think that if a creative writing professor wanted to show their students an example of “telling and not showing”, this book is filled with examples. This book is also a fantastic example of why it's so important to have external action and dialogue going on more than internal. I'd say about 70-80% of this book is all internal – internal dialogues and recaps of what we should have witnessed ourselves. You can't have a book that's majority internal because that's boring! Where are the other characters? Where's the action? Where are the interrogations?

The only things we got to see were the sex scenes and the occasional meeting between the detectives.

Oh and those detectives? They are so stupid. No I’m not kidding. None of them really had a brain. McNair was too busy pining over his ex-wife. Kruse spent way too much time thinking about corpses but not actually doing a good job with autopsying the body. Wieand and Shey spent way too much time day dreaming about having sex with each other – although to be fair at least Shey also assuming the wrong people were the murderers with no evidence aside from her so called fantastic detective skills telling her she's right and everyone else was wrong.

There is nothing in the text that would prove to me that these people are capable of solving any crime. We never see them do any interrogation. We never see them investigate. Quite frankly, I got the feeling this author never bothered to do research on detective work and on crime.

Take for example when they were discussing their murder victim’s death:

“Well,” said Kruse, “I’m developing a theory. I think (she) wasn’t quite dead when she went into the pool, although no one could’ve saved her life after this circ did its worst, but I think she drowned and that’s what actually killed her.”

But Kruse! I thought you were the forensic pathologist! Shouldn't you know by now what was the COD? Didn't you do the autopsy? How was this character’s death deemed a murder, then? How is it at this point the detectives have already made assumptions of who killed the victim when you don't know how she died? What did the circ do to her exactly? Did it interrupt the electrical flow of her heart, causing it to stop or beat erratically? Did it do something to her electrolytes? Did it do something to her nerves? Did it cause a seizure? Did it cause her respiratory functions to become impaired? What exactly happened?

Let's go further!

“You think?” Harata said. He was leaning over the desk and staring at all the unseeable parts and shaking his head. “It’s impossible to tell exactly,” Kruse said, “because by the time she went into the water—” “Was pushed into the water,” McNair said. “Well, yes,” Kruse said. “By then she couldn’t breathe.”

What in actual duck is this?

1. How do you know she was pushed into the water?

   • If the circ did something to her (caused her to have a seizure or impaired her respiratory functions for example), then she could have fallen into the water on her own.

2. So, the circ caused an impairment in her respiratory functions since she apparently “couldn’t breathe”. Okay, so she didn’t drown then.

   • As per two articles by Szpilman et. al, the World Health Organization defines drowning as “the process of experiencing respiratory impairment from submersion/immersion in liquid.” The articles also state that “The drowning process begins with respiratory impairment as the person’s airway goes below the surface of the liquid (submersion) or water splashes over the face (immersion)… Any submersion or immersion incident without evidence of respiratory impairment should be considered a water rescue and not a drowning” (Szpilman et. al,).
   • Dr. Michael Boniface, an emergency medicine physician at Mayo Clinic states, “Drowning occurs when you can’t get oxygen into your lungs because you are in or below water.”
   • Also something to consider: Modell et al. stated that “to ascribe drowning as a cause of death to a body found in water without some evidence of the effect of having aspirated water is risky.”

Just fyi, I found all of this information after about an hour of research and using Google Scholar to find and skim through peer-reviewed, scientific articles.

If the victim couldn’t breathe before she went into the water (pushed or not), then hypoxemia (abnormally low level of oxygen in the blood) and eventually hypoxia (absence of enough oxygen in the tissues to sustain bodily functions) began to occur before she made contact with the water. There are ways to _figure out _what happened and whether or not the victim drowned for sure! There are biochemical tests, macroscopical examinations of external and internal aspects of the body, microscopical examinations!

Chapter 13, the victim was dead. However, it’s not until CHAPTER 41 where the pathologist was like “hey so still not sure what the COD was but I think she drowned?? idk bro it’s impossible to tell.”

But because it's written down, I'm supposed to believe that these are the people who will solve this murder?

Give me a break and don’t make me laugh. None of these detectives would be able to figure anything out. They would need things to be spoon fed to them — oh wait :) That’s pretty much how this mystery was solved — because it was spoon fed to the detectives.

Quite frankly avoid this book. Don’t even think about buying it or borrowing a copy from someone else. Don’t read it! It’s a complete waste of time and I’m going to go drown my sorrows.

Anyway, thank you to BookSirens for providing me with a free copy of the eARC in exchange for this honest review. All opinions are my own.

#bookreview #deserveszerostars #generalfiction #mysterycrime