There were a lot of things that are fun about this book: the stalker rom-com vibes, the vibrant characterization, and the amazing duet style audiobook narration for starters. Unfortunately, this was greatly outweighed by the book’s many weak points.

On a surface level, seasoned readers will notice the grammar mistakes and malapropisms scattered throughout the book. (“Caught in the cookie jar”, “loosening up to me”, etc.) They were frequent enough to be distracting.

But on a deeper level, there were a lot of story choices I wasn’t a fan of. Here’s a few of them: 🩸 Romantic leads that don’t connect very deeply on an emotional level but are In Love 🩸 An MMC who’s described as ethically morally grey with the most nonsensical ethics pen has put to paper 🩸 Character-driven for 80% of the story but plot driven in the final act 🩸 Over-blocked scenes that make the pacing feel slow 🩸 A detective FMC but no realism to how crime investigations work 🩸 The FMC has personal struggles like her discontent with her job, dealing with her dad’s dementia, and processing her mom’s abandonment that just… go nowhere. They literally don’t get resolved. 🩸 A pushy matchmaker best friend who felt like a stand-in for the FMC’s own sense of agency 🩸 The flattest, least fleshed out villain who pops up towards the end of the book with character motivations that can be described as “idk, because I’m evil”

This is the kind of book that feels more like a collection of scenes strung together rather than a cohesive story. And while I love a more character-driven story, the characters weren’t nuanced enough to hold the book up nor was their romance believable enough to do all the heavy lifting. And unfortunately, the zany writing style just read as juvenile, which made the book hard for me to get through.

Thank you to Valentine PR for providing the ALC. 🖤

I really thought this book was gonna be a slam dunk and I’m so disappointed. This book had a lot of issues for me: thin world building, flat and unremarkable characters, and very little in the way of an engaging plot, considering how long this book is.

I went into this already forewarned that it’s a very lust-forward enemies to lovers romance, but I was still holy unprepared for how little emotional connection there is between these characters. They had little to no romantic chemistry, and I didn’t believe in their romance for a single second. We immediately dive into these really long sex scenes that I couldn’t bring myself to care about because I had no emotional stakes in their relationship. They didn’t have interesting banter, or deep conversations, and even as a praise, kink girly I found the use of “good girl” to be borderline excessive and cringey.

Given how the relationship between these characters is the whole crux of the story, I found myself dying for it to hurry up and be over. And unfortunately the writing was over-explanatory with clunky, uninteresting dialogue that made the experience even more of a slog. Again, I might be harsh because of how excited I was to dive into this book. I really wanted to love this, and didn’t enjoy a single element of this book.