I chose this book as my February 2024 book from Aardvark book club. I’ve purchased 13 other books through Aardvark and loved all of them, so I had high hopes for this one too. I also traveled to Italy recently and thought it would be fun to read a book that takes place in an old spooky town in Sicily. Unfortunately I couldn’t stand this book.

The writing itself was awful, the dialogue between characters was cringey, the characters were flat, and there were tons of plot holes. Also I hated the rhetoric of foreigners coming into small Italian towns to “save them” with tourism. Also as other reviewers pointed out, the author made little to no attempts to accurately portray Italian culture.

And to top it off the book wasn’t even scary or suspenseful. I read it as fast as I could to get through it and see if it got better at any point, it didn’t.