This was my first M. L. Rio book, and it seemed like it would be so interesting: A group of late shift workers who meet up in a semi-planned way for smoke breaks in a dilapidated cemetery. An unexpected open grave. A mystery that unfolds over the course of a single night.
Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work for me. It’s hard to pin down the genre. It’s a horror book, but without much horror; a thriller, but without much thrill; a mystery, but one that’s solved too fast to provide much satisfaction; and even a little bit dark academia. I wouldn’t mind this mashup at all, if it had been done well. Instead we get a half-baked, rushed plot with amateur sleuths and a fairly unsatisfying ending. It’s almost slice of life, which would make the unfinished threads more acceptable, but the ending makes it feel like what comes next would be bigger than slice of life.
What I did like was some of the prose. There were passages and word choices that were entertaining at times. One of my favorites was right at the beginning: “. . . the church itself had been boarded up and was so overgrown with vines and moss and mold that the DANGER, KEEP OUT sign nailed across the doors was decidedly redundant.”
This wasn’t a terrible book, but it certainly didn’t deliver on its promise. I don’t think it works as a novella, although it probably could have if the author had made some different choices or perhaps made it a bit longer. The writing just didn’t make up for the rest of its flaws.