Everyone Who Can Forgive Me is Dead

How do I put this? Let me paint a word picture:

You know when you have a perfectly good simple recipe? Let's pretend it’s a loaf of homemade bread. Just plain ol’ dependable white bread. It’s predictable, safe comfort food, and you know exactly what you’re getting because you’ve tasted it so many times before. With me so far?

OK. Now you have company coming over and you REALLY want to impress them with your baking skills, so you decide to zazz up that simple recipe by adding a little more salt for flavor … then some spices … then … well, let’s just keep adding more spices … and what the heck … maybe throw in a smidge of extra baking powder to get that bread nice and fluffy! If a little bit is good, then surely adding more is better, right?

When the loaf comes out it looks amazing on the outside and it smells so good, but when you bite into it, it just tastes … off.

That’s my experience with this book, in a nutshell. It had all the ingredients to make a solid story, but the flavor got muddled by either too many or just the wrong ingredients for me.  Read others’ reviews if you’d like a plot rundown. This time I’m only offering my final general impression.

Let me start with what worked. The prose is good, the plot has been done many times in one form or another but was solid, and the whodunnit stayed within the scope of believability, which was nice.

So where did this one miss for me? The pace was a little slow, you don’t get details about the actual mystery until about a quarter of the way through, I didn’t like any of the characters apart from two who showed up at the END of the book and were barely in it - one of which was a DOG, and the twists fell flat.  In trying to fool the reader with the lost memories trope, the ending got muddled in misdirection, making me feel more confused than surprised, and, unfortunately, this was a rare time when the audio made my experience worse. 

Is it a bad book? Not at all. It just wasn’t to my particular taste. Others have enjoyed it much more, so please read some of those reviews before you decide. My guess is that Jenny Hollander will have some great stories to savor in the future!

★★ ½

Thanks to Minotaur Books, NetGalley and author Jenny Hollander and Macmillan Audio for this digital ARC to honestly review. It’s due to be published on February 6, 2024.