skygiants

The youths all seem likeable and the loss of the trust and friendship among them as important to the plot as the murder itself, which is one of the things that makes the book work, IMO.

Crashing straight through into spoiler territory: I really appreciated that the awful behavior of the murder victim was not used to justify his death; killing him did stop him from ruining at one stroke the lives of just about everyone who had originally loved him, but it also stopped him from any chance of change, because he was so young and panicking in a free-fall of embittered entitlement and it's true that he might have just calcified into that destructive person, but no one will ever know if he could have gotten better because instead he got dead. It closed all possibilities. I care about that recognition.

(I read this book about a month ago and it was the first KJ Charles I had actually liked since my first try at her with Spectred Isle (2017), which is not meant as faint praise: I am designed more for mysteries than romances and I enjoyed the blend here, as well as the fact that it felt in some ways like a more direct and Edwardian take on a B-noir I am fond of. I did find it consistently underwritten as if she had traded in most of the prose in order to pack in the plot and I am not convinced the book would have turned out such a doorstop if she had written in more of the non-verbal information of all the emotionally important conversations, but it was not too thin for me to attach to the characters. Agreed that by process of representation it was not difficult to figure out the villain. I did like the structure of solving the murder which was not necessarily the mystery.)