This book neared 4 stars at times, and it is my favourite Polk to date. I'd also recommend it pretty widely, despite everything I'm about to say about it; skip to the bottom for what I liked. The premise on this one is the main reason I picked it up, which is a strange thing to say when all I knew about it was F/F Chicago historical noir; this made for several surprises as I entered Act III. SpoilerThis book has a heavy angels & demons plotline I did NOT know about going in, which didn't put me off per se, but the book also didn't endear me to such tropes much better. (No wings of any kind, which surprised me. Isn't the point of angel tropes the wingfic? Never mind.)

I had difficulties throughout the book mainly with pacing and prose. The book moves along at breakneck speed, at times undermining its own emotional beats with its dedication to moving the plot along. Several reviewers say they wish it was longer, which (a) is a common emotion with novellas, but (b) suggests a general feeling of underdevelopment and unrealized potential, which I also felt while reading. 

My problems with prose are linked to pacing in two ways. One was the organization of certain paragraphs, and the way summary sometimes impeded immersion and threw me out of the flow of prose. I sent this paragraph to friends for a gut check on whether this scene appeared out of order:

I was reliably assured I was being silly; this last sentence is meant to summarize the general process, in contrast to the specifics the earlier sentences offer. I—looking for sequential steps to envision what the character's movements were—found it strange to describe viewfinding through the camera after describing the taking of the picture. To be clear, I like some of what this paragraph is doing quite well. What's intriguing about historical settings is the atmosphere and the physical experience of the setting, and the procedure of taking a picture is an important component of setting that stuff up. In addition to what's described, we can imagine the bulky weight of the camera in her hands, the feeling of the shutter clicking, the sounds and smells of the photo being taken. But we are being asked to imagine these elements; only the visual and procedural elements of touch are actually on the page. Instead of these descriptions that would ground us in the scene, we get a summary/overview statement about the "all-seeing eye of the Graflex," which—even if not out of order, as my instincts suggested—adds little we didn't already understand about taking a picture.

Either this sentence was added to pace the scene a little better—pacing again—or it was there in an attempt to match a noir style. I found the style a good effort if not quite convincing, which is another issue of prose; that said, I last read Chandler 15 years ago, so I won't comment on style in any depth. Regardless, I found myself frequently underwhelmed by the setting. I had no significant grand sense of what '40s Chicago was like beyond immediate visual and occasional auditory cues. The acrid smell of cigarette smoke could have become a sensual element, the crunch of snow under the heeled boots the women are wearing might have heightened the sense of tension and trepidation. I don't think every book has to be this substantial on a sensory level, but my preference in historicals is that the setting is substantially developed, or why are we here and now? Whether by description or otherwise, this setting felt thin.

My other issue is dialogue, particularly where Ted, Helen's brother, is concerned. Ted speedruns us through every element of their relationship, often showing up at convenient times to present expository dialogue or otherwise unpick the plot. The thin secondary character may be perfectly fitting for a noir, but the plot became a train speeding through a town at 210mph: you can clearly see individual elements of the environs are there, but you can't quite make out the true shape of them. Particularly when much of the catharsis of the story is oriented around Ted's plotline, and their history is required to make sense of the climax, giving Ted a more complex character than 'plot device' seems worth an additional 20 pages of the book, even if it does slow pacing. (Marlowe's dialogue was similarly speedrunning character development as another secondary character who thrusted the plot, but the author at least found her interesting and gave her aesthetic flair. Marlowe's name, too, another interesting nod to Chandler, but she fills a different niche here; can't help but feel like something could have been made of this, or that something was made of this and I have salami where my head should be.)

Ted's development speedrun may contribute to why I disliked the ending; spoilers follow. SpoilerTed's confession that he was in heaven had none of the payoff of Season 6 Buffy, and came so substantially out of nowhere (to me) that I was white guy blinking at the page for a while. I approached the angels and demons stuff with as much neutrality as I could muster, but the introduction of heaven—while perhaps necessary in a world where these tropes form the centrepiece—sent my rating clunking down from 4 stars pretty quickly. It might not have been a problem if Helen didn't know about this and then, learning absolutely nothing from this confession, yank Edith out of heaven anyway for entirely selfish reasons. I don't think this is unearned thematically; Helen making the same mistake twice makes her stand out among her crew of angels. She keeps selling her soul. What, in the world of angels and demons—particularly when her girlfriend and her brother are both (pardon me) angel-coded—does that make her?

But it did seem unearned purely from a character development position, taking angels and demons completely out of it. You learn that your brother died and went to heaven, and that you pulled him out of it, and that he hasn't really forgiven you for that—and then you knowingly do that same thing to the love of your life, expecting to get more time with her? Equal bet she's pissed at you and can't believe you acted so selfishly, particularly when she's so aggressively Catholic. Whatever Helen is, how is her very literally angelic girlfriend like "babe, it's so sexy when you're morally dubious." But maybe my head is once again salami and I'm not immersed in enough Christian lore and morals to pick up on the nuances here.

All to say, I think if Ted's confession was in there, it should have mattered significantly more to the plot. I feel the ending undermined it, but it's also possible it needed to be there, thematically, to convince us YFIP (Helen). If true, it needed to be more naturally integrated into the text and to result in more substantial consequences than a bit of climactic shouting and a denouement in the form of a shrug emoji.

What I liked, meanwhile, was the premise of Helen herself: a lesbian occult noir detective. The book hits its stride around the time it comes out that she sold her soul to save her younger brother, and that he subsequently hadn't spoken to her in ten years. I really, really liked the ticking clock element of that ten-year interval, and how opaque Helen initially is about the money and note she left Edith and why. Not much is made of the magic society Helen was expelled from as a result of this action, but it makes her an outcast in several directions: she's a working class lesbian on the outs even from her magical society, which marginalizes her from the rest of society in another respect. This rules to hell, and I'd have spent a full 300 pages with her exploring the exact things she spends the novel exploring: gender-based violence, state violence, medical exploitation, queerness, morality. 

I found the magic system a bit vague, but did not need it explained; I liked the bits and pieces that were thrown in there, like the need for good (and thus costly) materials and how Helen basically needs the wealthy Marlowe to sponsor her use of magic. The lesbian underground was so, so great, and I'd have liked to see it/its personages more utilized in the story. I also liked the awareness I had of the title the whole time I read the book: we believe that we, too, know the end, but in fact I didn't. As much as the specifics of the ending didn't land for me, I really admired how it was structured and how unable I was to predict the book's ultimate events.

The fact that I keep saying "would have liked to have seen more of this" speaks to such a substantial well of potential in this book. It's this that'll bring me back to Polk's work: how excited I was about so many things this book holds fundamental to its core.