The ideas in this book are so interesting it's a shame the book itself is a disjointed shambles patched together from convenience and "cleverness." Rarely have my fingers so itched to rewrite an entire book, preferably with storylines and characterization that actually go somewhere instead of terminating in smug, lazy nonsense. ( )

https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2022/02/202224-wren-hunt-mary-watson.html ( )

I received a free e-book copy of this book for an honest review.

This is the gem for me. The one that I have been hoping to find in various other books but it was never discovered until now. I will admit I was slightly confused when I first started reading, but once that scene ended and I was given the reaction of various characters around the main character, I was hooked. I was pulled along a crazy roller coaster of a story, and I didn't regret any of it. I was up until four in the morning, and even with the lack of sleep, having to go to work a few hours later, I would gladly have done it again.

There's very little I can actually divulge about this book, and if I attempted to, I doubt I would be able to do it justice. The characters are all well-rounded, and human. It's so difficult to find books that don't give the people in their novel quirks, but actual personality traits that are good, and some that would make them nasty; not someone you would want to be a friend of. None of the background characters just appear to move the story along, but have a point. While not all of their motives are ever explained, at the same time the reader is given enough to guess. The reader may be completely wrong, but even the supposed villains of this book are interesting.

This entire book blew way above my expectations, even the bits I was unsure were the imagination of the author, or else had foundations in Irish lore, for example. I will certainly be googling to find out, but no matter what I might discover, I applaud the author for the amount of work was put into this.

This is one that I will be buying within the next couple of days, and I highly recommend for any other reader who enjoys mysteries, who doesn't need romance to be the forefront of the story, and who enjoy complex threads weaved together to come to a crescendo at the end that rips apart the reader's heart. I can only hope there is a sequel, though at the same time all the possibilities that could be in the main character's future is just as good. ( )