Damn.
After how OBSESSED I was with A Dowry of Blood and how GOOD An Education in Malice was, this one really fell flat. The pacing was poor, the characters were lackluster, the stakes were neglected... I'm struggling to find a positive, honestly. ((Even the narration on this audio ARC (thanks Netgalley!) wasn't very good-- granted I listen at 2x speed, but it should still be pretty smooth. This narrator sometimes added pauses where there weren't any (bc dumb me got a physical copy too) and at other times completely disregarded page breaks. There were also a few instances, closer to the start, where I could just tell it was edited-- a slight change in tone or volume that would throw me off. )) By the time I was finishing this up I was falling asleep and I didn't even care. Quite frankly, I needed more from this. I needed more backstory about David's relationship with his father and WAY more context for his relationship with Rhys. I didn't care at all about the stakes in this book because we spent about 70% pretending they didn't even exist and I can't even remember what we were doing in that time. In a Dowry of Blood I could really feel Costanza's turmoil. This book didn't make me feel anything.
Apologies if this is incoherent, I should've been asleep well over an hour ago but I'm just cranky about this and needed to stay up to rant.