4.25⭐

Thanks to NetGalley and Bindery x Kist Reads for the ARC!

Please, sir, may I have some more? 🥺🙏

What an absolutely fantastic read. Tense and twisty, featuring a pair of protagonists with nothing left to lose, all the ingredients for an excellent fantasy heist without feeling stale or boilerplate. Felix and Myria's character arcs particularly shine, they're my babies. Sign me up for at least seventeen sequels.

Thanks to NetGalley and Atria for the ARC!

local yearning man can be a tiny bit feral, as a treat

Dr. McAlister is so good at weaving her tangled webs. I don't think there was a moment in this book where I didn't viscerally feel the weight of everything trying to bear down on Fiona and Satoshi. There were so many factors trying to keep them apart, and it was actually so cathartic to watch it all come crashing down so that they could finally approach each other with nothing but themselves. I really, really love Satoshi and Fiona as our lead couple. There's almost nothing they have in common on paper, but their mutual goodness and decency is such a strong connecting thread, and it makes it very easy to root for them.

I do think I wish that the thread with Matt was a little more fleshed out-- Fiona spends so much time comparing Satoshi and Matt in her mind that it would have been great to rub it in Matt's face a little bit. Similarly it would have been great to see more of Satoshi bonding with Fiona's kids, not as the owner of Tsundoku but as someone who will eventually be a replacement father figure to them. He's such a perfect match for the family, and it would have been great to see just a tiny bit more of that. Still, I'm so pleased with what we got, I always have a good time in a McAlister novel.

Loved this, can't wait for book three when Isamu and Chess finally reveal their torrid affair. Or maybe they'll be scooped by Julia and Elias's decades-long situationship, who can say? 😂

if ever there was a book that could convert me to instalove as a trope it might be this one (i'm not converted, for the record, but i still thoroughly enjoyed this)

What a truly astounding book

I thought the ending was a little abrupt, but otherwise I absolutely reveled in this. It was, at turns, fun, fascinating, fulfilling, and devastating.

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for the ARC!

There's not much offensive about this novel. Every aspect seems written to appeal to a fairly wide audience, but unfortunately this really only made the book as a whole bland. Multi-generational book club chic? I'm sure this will be a great Hallmark movie script someday, but I didn't find that it particularly captured my imagination.

hey would you look at that, my simultaneous chronic fears that i am both too much and not enough to be loved have reared their ugly heads once more, i wonder how that happened

also a big fan of the cop love interest who actually realizes how corrupt the institution is and starts working to bring it down. di thomas peck you are the only man in uniform i will ever respect.

also also i would kill a man for a film adaptation of this in the style of those guy ritchie sherlock holmes films.