I remember being hopeful when Phoebe got fed up with Kim's lies and paternalistic behavior in The Sugared Game and broke off their engagement, and was kind of interested in general in their strange relationship & how that reflected his values and attachment to his power as an aristocratic man in spite of all his nonconformism in other ways... and then she promptly forgave him and played spunky supportive second-string female character (complete with offscreen relationship) in book 3. Sigh.

Honestly, I like KJC's sentence-level writing a fair bit and I enjoy her concepts, and I'm interested in Death in the Spires... but I kind of hope she tries writing in a genre space without strict structural requirements in general, whether romance or mystery, because I feel like that can encourage those lazy tidy habits about secondary characters. But IDK, it may just be baked in at this point.