Is this some wild teen PSA?
^^ this the original review that I wrote in mild exasperation after reading this book. I actually had this on an older TBR that I never got around to finishing, so in the middle of waiting for some new books to load I was more than happy to finally pick it up.
But GOOD LORD this book is just one heavy handed lesson in what happens when you do [insert any number of things that they told you not to do in elementary school which, honestly, form a healthy part of becoming an adult in society]. You drink and drive? SOMEONE WILL DIE. You have teenage sex? SOMEONE WILL GET PREGNANT. You try on a new persona or social group? YOU WILL END UP IN JAIL. You try to disobey your parents? YOU WILL HAVE CRIPPLING ANXIETY FOREVER.
Everyone felt like a caricature, and in all honesty this book felt like a weak imitation of something Liane Moriarty might have written. But probably about adults, because I do have the same issue I have with many books that feature teenagers—they are, by definition, children who lack frontal processing systems. A story about the stupid decisions teenagers make is fine, but requires a lot of nuance to hold the attention of me, an adult woman reader who made it through the fires of adolescence and has grown from her mistakes as opposed to atoning for them.
I will just NEVER learn my lesson, will I? There’s something about books featuring Indian American characters that just doesn’t do it for me.
I should really unpack that, in full, with someone.
In my defense, this book ended up being entirely too slapstick and ridiculous for me regardless of the ethnicities of the main characters, although that characteristic did end up slightly coloring the story. In trying to aim for a Date Night type vibe, it feels like Rai brainstormed a number of increasingly implausible situations for our main characters to find themselves in and then…figured out a way to loosely string them all together.
Just way too much jumping the shark for me to get into the novel, even with my distinguished track record of enjoying slapstick-y work. We’ve got mistaken identities, guns, on the run, have to dress up like a stripper/waitress, and that’s not even half the book if I remember correctly. When someone correctly identified a diamond necklace as fake over video call is when I started giggling in earnest, and from then on the shark had been jumped and it was essentially over.
I liked this for a while, before getting lost for good around the 70-75%(!) mark with some details that just ruined the whole charming endeavor for me.
First, the good. We have a pretty quirky(TM) world building going on here, with a parallel universe type set up. Basically, people try to enter this parallel world to get riches or some such, but if you die in the parallel world your body becomes the host for a malevolent spirit that can cause real hard to the living. Sheriffs are tasked with hunting down these corpses, shooting them in the spleen, and, if they don’t have a pre-paid funeral arrangement, take them to the nearest funeral home to be given a proper send off. We start out with a good ol’ Enemies at First Sight (ish) trope between Mercy and Hart, and there are some B and C plots as well.
But the other trope we use is the whole “secret pen pals” one from such luminary works such as You’ve Got Mail and the issue is that it’s REALLY hard to make that work when the inevitable moment comes where one character knows that they’re the secret pen pals, the other does not, and they first character acts on that knowledge (even indirectly by not telling character two). Look, it’s not straight up assault or anything that terrible, but it’s a clear lie by omission and blatant breach of trust. It’s hard to imagine coming back from it, but we’re asking to do that multiple times here. Even harder when character one realizes they’re being a little twerp…and proceeds to continue being a twerp nonetheless.
The magic system is, as noted, quirky at the outset but also struggles under the weight of the mystery that drives the plot forward—for once, it’s almost too light and obvious (or, as I have noted elsewhere, perhaps I have read too many of these novels to be surprised anymore when the butler turns out to have done it). Your mileage might vary as well as to the comfort of having a sheriff as a main character, even though it’s very clear in this world that their only job is hunting down eldritch beings in another dimension.