Thanks to NetGalley and MacMillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review.
I’m not sure how much help my review is going to be here, because I’m pretty certain I would have given it a different rating (though maybe not that different) had I not done the audio. I really wish I hadn’t jumped on this ARC instead of waiting for the hard copy to come in to my library.
This is a queer murder mystery. It is not like Knives Out at all, so don’t go in expecting that. Terrible marketing is what that is. The narrator is an ex-cop, recently fired for being caught with his pants down in a raid on a gay bar, and he’s actually suicidal when Pearl finds him, and hires him to investigate what she thinks is the murder of her lover, Irene, the owner of Lavender House. She ran a famous soap company as well, and I cannot tell you how much I regret that I didn’t realize soap would be a big part of this book and as I am sensitive to smells and hate most manufactured ones, this book was not fun in that regard at all. Even somebody talking about imaginary fake scents makes me angry.
Again, because of the audio, I am now unable to tell if I would have liked this better if I had read the hardcover instead, but I did do the audio, and it very much did not work for me. I thought I just didn’t vibe with the narrator, but it turns out he narrated the audio for The Charm Offensive, an audiobook I very much enjoyed, so it was really just the way he read this one that got to me. He was incredibly melodramatic in his reading, and he gave it a real noir vibe. I dislike noir. Within the first 25 pages I disliked almost all the characters except for some of the employees living in Lavender House (a queer haven, basically). I thought the mystery was uninteresting, and while it was clear I was supposed to be liking this queer haven the narrator Andy had been brought to, the voices the narrator used for them all made them seem whiny and privileged and snide and name some other adjectives. I was feeling so negative about them that I did not buy that aspect of the story at all. It sounded like all these people hated their lives and didn’t really like each other, either.
The investigation I found dull.
So, a miss. You might fare better.