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I've started to call Turton the M Night Shyamalan of fiction. His books are very high concept and start really strongly but lose themselves in the pursuit of a surprising twist that manifests as a messy third act that more or less ruins the book for me.

This is definitely better than The Devil and the Dark Water for the most part, but the final 20% is a hot mess that I read more out of a sense of obligation than any sort of enjoyment. And it's a shame, because up until that point I was really enjoying it. It's an interesting mystery, and there's some novel stuff going on here. I particularly liked the clever way of making an omnipotent third person narrator actually be a meaningful character in the narrative (though it stops being clever when you realise that Abi knows everything that happened the entire time and that the plot is driven largely by her refusal to ever tell anyone, for reasons that are sort of addressed but not in a satisfying way).

I have a laundry list of complaints and things that bugged me about the final section of the book that range from big structural things to minor annoyances like "you lost track of the geography of your own setting", but I won't list them here. I really wanted to enjoy this. I loved The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle despite not caring for the ending (in that case I simply didn't like it rather than thinking it was Bad) and wanted to see Turton return to that form after missing on Dark Water, but this is another miss for me. There are some great ideas here and a very gripping first half but ultimately it just doesn't work.