*Character names may be misspelled as I only listened to the audiobook.

This book... I was quite interested from the start, as I enjoy serial killer stories, especially diving into their psychology. E.g., I love Andreas Gruber's works in this regard. However, I was disappointed. Until the very end, the detectives had no clue as to who the murderer is, and little psychological analysis was happening. They were simply being strung along by the "mastermind" killer. While not unrealistic, it doesn't make for a good story imo.

And then there were a load of other issues. A lot of stuff simply didn't make sense/seemed unrealistic, such as:

- not releasing the killer's picture to the press until the two cops got abducted
- showing Gemma's POV when she was assaulted by the killer, but apparently it was all fake? Unless I'm misremembering, it really didn't reflect her involvement in the whole plot at all
- the entire plot twist. It just seemed... so contrived? We really didn't get enough perspective into Gemma and Richard's past to justify the entire spiel
- both Gemma and Richard somehow being crazily good actors so nobody ever noticed... Right.

Otherwise, as many people in the audible reviews pointed out, the narrator was horrible. His interpretation of women's voices was ridiculous, and the emotional scenes were not convincing to me. Not to mention that almost every single character sounded the same, to the point that it was hard to tell who was speaking in scenes without dialogue tags.

Further, I found it a bit ridiculous to refer to the criminals as "villains." Also didn't really appreciate the positive framing of the Iraq war/military, but that's probably realistic for the time and the characters. Just irked me as a bit overly simplistic.

And yeah, the ending was just so frustrating. Not only was the plot twist not convincing, but everything was sorted out too cleanly. 

Two stars because I liked Lizz and I enjoyed the first half or so of the story. For example, I appreciated that it *mostly* skipped over that frustrating "not taking this case seriously until somebody dies" phase/trope.