What a crazy world Atty Eve has created in this series. It is a crazy mix between Dexter and Skins and it is both at times repulsive and others captivating. Cosette and her “family” is a group of damaged to completely broken people which Cosette definitely is, and they all have destructive to lethal proclivities. Cosette aims one of her more destructive needs at a fairly sinister group of people while trying to wrangle and protect her growing family.
The narration by Brenda Scott Wlazlo is really great and I thought she did a phenomenal job with voicing everyone in the whole book. She had a great range of voices to make every individual stand out and great delivery for all of these damaged souls at both times when they are revealing something painful or doing something outrageous. I look forward to hearing her work again in the future.
This is a book that deals with the inner demons and motivations of a lot of these characters and has a lot of hard to sit through scenes. Cosette is a monster who is living to some sort of inner code to protect her family, but you get the feeling that if there were no obvious evils to set her monstrous impulses upon she might not be able to contain these impulses. That is what often makes he maybe not a truly empathetic heroine, but she is an interesting character. A lot of the characters have been given a lot more backstory and reasons for why they are damaged or act the way they do. This book does have some meandering sections, but they are intentional as we are glimpsing into the lives of these characters and not just on a ride with them. Atty Eve is a talented writer and can truly make my skin crawl, and I look forward to seeing more of their work. If you enjoyed the first two books you will enjoy this one, but you should definitely dip your toes in the water with the first book and not go straight into the third if you are looking at this book without reading the series.
I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.