I picked this up hoping for a relaxing and fun fantasy meets murder mystery meets steampunk read but unfortunately it didn't quite work for me. For the first half, I often felt like I was missing some information. While this is partly lack of knowledge on my part (I am not very familiar with arabic culture and its lore of djinns etc), I also felt that I was missing backstory. This impression was confirmed to me when I read on pagebound that this book has three prequel novellas.

I properly got into it for the second half, but it still fell flat for me. While we were constantly being told that Fatma was this overachieving cop, we never really got to see her talent. In fact, I thought the main characters had very little agency and the plot was mostly driven by events that happened to them, which hindered the flow of the story. At the very end, there was almost a slapstick element to the unraveling of the problem, which did not really fit with how the story was told previously. Overall, I thought this novel tried to be too many things at once (a steampunk novel? a murder mystery? a fantasy epic?) and it didn't quite work out for me.

That being said, I thought the steampunk Cairo setting very unique and I would love to read and learn more about Djinns and Ifrits etc in a fantasy novel setting. I loved the descriptions of the outfits in this books as imo that is an underused way of painting a picture of a character. My heart definitely belongs to the side characters, Siti and in particular Hadia, whom I would have loved to read more about. Overall, I would consider picking up another book set in this world (maybe one of the prequels? let me know which you would recommend!) but this one didn't do it for me.