Scenario: You start reading a book, and then get a reminder that it’s due back to the library soon. Assuming no renewals, do you 1) speed through the rest, or 2) give up. The Antique Hunter’s Death on the Red Sea is going to be a ‘give it back not completely read’ for me. There’s nothing wrong with it as far as I’ve gotten, but it’s not quite what I want right now.
I kind of wonder if I’d read the first in the series first (this is book 2), it might be a different situation, but I don’t really have a problem getting what’s going on, who’s who, and the general sense of world of the story. I think I was wanting a cozy art theft/murder mystery about two ladies with an antique shop solving the crime, with maybe a little help from the cute FBI agent. That does seem to be the case here, and both Freya and her aunt Carole seem like they could star in just such a story, but it’s pretty clear that this story isn’t really cozy; it’s suspense, with secret societies, a bunch of agendas, spies, and so on. Again, nothing wrong with that, but it’s just not what I wanted.
I probably should have figured the suspense angle sooner once I realized that some chapters are told from different perspectives; that’s a suspense tactic, and it starts pretty early on. As far as I got, the voices/narration doesn’t change that much, but it didn’t bother me as much the way it might otherwise because the characters do have their own thoughts and understandings and knowledge, even if they don’t quite have individual voices. To be clear, we’re not talking first person narration, that’s really not my favorite and would likely be counted against the book. The story is told in free indirect discourse, which I’m mostly fine with.
Maybe I come back to this some day, maybe not. Right now, it’s just kind of meh, and I don’t care enough at the moment.