TW: Gore, violence, lots of blood
I received this book as an e-ARC from Orbit so thank you to them.
I went into ‘Mistress of Lies’ incredibly excited by the premise involving blood magic, morally gray characters and the hunt for a serial killer. And boy was I disappointed.
We do have an absolute banger of an opening scene where our female lead murders her father in order to take his role as head of the family. We are also introduced to Shan’s co-conspirator, Bart, who is her brother’s boyfriend. And here I thought he would play an important role in the story but uh no, we barely see him. Frankly, that was a missed opportunity. And believe me, it was all downhill from there.
Although we have Shan starting her arc with a murder, she doesn’t really do anything interesting for the rest of the book. She claims to be the ‘Sparrow’ a spy master who gathers secrets from informants across the city. Except we never see her do that and she never uses the ‘secrets’ to advance the plot beyond meeting Samuel, the male lead. I was expecting the ‘mistress of lies’ to be intelligent and good at emotional manipulation. Instead, she was frankly an idiot who didn’t see anything coming despite it being obvious.
Our male lead, Samuel, also did not do much beyond lusting after Shan and another character Isaac. He has a power similar to Kilgrave’s from Jessica Jones where he can use his voice to command people to do whatever he wants. He bemoans being forced to use the power by the Eternal King but never thinks to use his power ON the Eternal King….. I’m more forgiving of him being an idiot as I think he was supposed to be pretty but stupid.
As for our supposed hunt for a serial killer……yeah that doesn’t happen. The Eternal King asks Shan and Samuel to conduct the investigation alongside the official one (because of reasons? Its never really explained). And then they don’t do that. There is ZERO investigation. Instead, Enright has a series of scenes where Shan, Isaac and Samuel are obviously lusting after one another and…….no plot happens. The Eternal King then has to TELL SHAN AND SAMUEL HOW THE VICTIMS ARE CONNECTED AND GIVE THEM THE CLUE ON WHO THE NEXT VICTIM WILL BE. I’m sorry, I thought our super smart spymaster with her own information network COULD HAVE FIGURED THAT OUT OR EVEN TRIED. I legitimately almost stopped reading the book at that point because I couldn’t handle how dumb it had gotten.
And if you were expecting a fun and creative use of blood magic…..please look elsewhere. Nothing about the ‘Blood Working’ is explained beyond ‘blood + magic = whatever the plot needs’. Just no thought put into what could have been a unique magic system. And honestly its just a symptom of the overall lazy world building.
I do not want to spoil the ending but lets just say that there were some problematic indulgence of tropes surrounding trans men. (At least in my opinion, the trans community may feel differently.)
Long story short, I gave this book two stars and I wouldn’t waste my time reading it.