Overall, this was a good book. The mystery was intriguing, and I did not guess who the culprit was. In retrospect, there were a few clues that I missed, but I also think there was a lot of information the author held back until the very end, which made it feel a bit like the reveal came out of left field. The mystery itself was well thought out, and there were plenty of credible red herrings that kept me on my toes; I just felt like it could have been executed with a bit more finesse. The use of two parallel timelines was impressively ambitious and it was soooo close to working.

That said… The book moved slowly, and there was a lot of repetitive and unnecessary information. Very little dialogue and sparse action; most of the narrative is the POV characters thinking in long blocks of text. When there was dialogue, it was a lot of monologues and a lot of repetition with very few action beats to break up the the text and give readers something to visualize. I found myself skimming paragraphs that took up 2/3 of a page, back to back. Even during action sequences, when tension and/or emotions should have been high, the writing was slow and the characters remained even keeled, clear headed, and relatively emotionless. I felt no real urgency, and I didn’t feel connected to the characters or even sympathetic for them. I think they could have been better developed—particularly the two narrators, who often sounded like the same person.

There were a few errors but overall it was clean and well edited. The author has a lot of potential and I look forward to seeing her writing develop and improve!