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I dislike this narrator so much. While I can normally look past her voice to enjoy a good story, this sequel doesn't live up to it's predecessor. The FMC is annoying and the male MMC is bland and boring. The combination of the above is making this book one of the biggest slogs to get through. It's taken me 18 days to get half way through the book and it's due back in 18hrs. I may dnf because this is a chore.

IM CRYING

Blasting through this one and really enjoying it.

It's taking me a while to get through this audiobook because Nathan Fillion, while a great actor, has a speech pattern that makes it often hard to understand. He'll be understandable for the first half of a sentence, speed up for a second, then finish slow, or start a sentence slow and then finish too quickly. Because of this, I've had to slow the audiobook down to .85x speed as I kept missing and misshearing parts.

I still love Fin and I've enjoyed this book for the most part, but it's unnecessarily long, has many cringe inducing moments, and desperately could have used a proper editor to help with not just those issues, but also pacing. I'm apparently listening to an audiobook of the 2022 release, and the 2024 release seems to have an actual editor, but I've yet to find an audiobook of that version.

Update: I still love Finn, my little anti-social goblin.

3% in and I love Fin!!!!!!!!

I was tempted to DNF this book very early on as multiple POVs are very jarring to me and often pull me out of the narrative. However, my love (and appetite) of a good mystery is endless, and so I persevered. Around the 30% mark is when I found myself fully absorbed into the book and now that I'm halfway through, I can definitively say I'm glad I stuck with it.

Okay, I'm only 16% into the book but wtf is with the male lead???? He keeps making misogynistic comments as self-deprecating jokes (I think???) but 1. EW, and 2. Who does that? He's also genuinely an a-h*le and I do not understand what Hazlewood was thinking when she designed his character. His behaviour is so off-putting that I might actually DNF this.

Honestly, I think the murderer is very obvious and I will be shocked if I've gotten it wrong. This would normally sour my experience (I don't like the mystery to be excessively easy to guess) but the people Vera has met have been shockingly fleshed out so far. Their very human stories have been wonderfully interwoven and has pulled me in deep. I am finding myself more invested in them than the actual mystery.

We're in it now, folks!!! The last third of this book is dramatic, tense and has me screaming at every twist and turn.

Why yes, I am back on my (yearly) Murderbot bs 💅