This is not a case of false advertising–I went into this book fully amped up to read about a female serial killer who makes a career out of offing terrible men whose crimes fall outside the purview of the judicial system. Zero issues there, honestly! But what I couldn’t get into was the tone of the whole thing. It seemed to veer at times: between showing what scary competence can look like, to having Scarlett make some uncharacteristic mistakes, to a historical plot that’s meant to illustrate why someone might turn to a life of unrepentant crime, to a bit of a tense “will she be caught or won’t she” but nothing that really “stuck” for me.
For a book that’s about terrible men (actually terrible, not just like “posts a Tinder profile with a tiger” terrible) getting their comeuppance, there’s surprisingly little joy, visceral or otherwise, in seeing how Scarlett has gotten away with it. Most of her crimes are, by necessity, told in flashback given that even the most clueless of local investigators are likely to pick up on a rash of dead students. But it does make the ones that she picked all the more important, and honestly none of them seemed like they were worth the trouble. Why go through all that effort to kill someone so petty? Why not go after bigger fish?
When the main plot gets going–after the twist which maybe I should have seen coming, but see before re: my inability to catch plot twists–the book does move quickly towards the end. Just didn’t feel very involved in getting there.
