I’m waffling, but have settled on two stars. You will get through this one, but painfully so.

The writing is clumsily attempting to be more serious than it is, the narrators and core friend group of “Harvard women” are caricatures of themselves, and the hand-wringing flashback secrets Andrea Bartz teases throughout the early chapters are later revealed to be quite unimaginative.

There was a lot of promise with the setting (a highly curated, influencer-approved women’s coworking space), but once the mystery is set into action, we completely lose focus on the site. Any chance that Bartz will explore the larger dynamic around workplace mysteries or the toxicity of corporate feminist spaces is lost the minute a certain someone winds up dead.