A former grifter on the run, a drug-addict prostitute, the true-crime-obsessed owner of a sleazy Las Vegal motel, and an antisocial computer genius team up to hunt down a serial killer.

Sounds like the start of a joke, right? Well, there is humor all throughout this book, but it’s definitely an edge-of-your-seat thriller with some scenes that were on the border of what I could handle, violence-wise. Never crossed over into too much, though, and I thought the topics of the story (the psychology, sexuality, prostitution, addiction, poverty, crime, gambling, alcoholism, the way the US treats immigrants, etc) were handled very well. It’s not a heavy-handed book, despite the Big Topics – instead, they are all integrated into the background and setting of the story.

There were a few things that I didn’t particularly like. In the last 25% or so, there started being “interludes” told from other points of view than the narrator’s. I wouldn’t have minded this at all if it were there from the beginning. Having these only at the end made it feel like the story couldn’t be told the same way as the majority of the story. There was also a misdirect at one point that felt lazy for the storytelling. But both of those complaints were relatively minor. I was expecting there to be some weird twist at the end that would ruin the book for me (too often something that happens in thrillers for me) but the story flowed and ended naturally.

Best part of this book, though, was the fact that the narrator is a lesbian and it has nothing to do with the premise of the story. Her being a lesbian has no bearing on the substance of the plot, it’s just a fact about her. Her sexuality is treated as indifferently as a straight narrator’s, with mentions of past relationships and current flings and personal attraction etc. It’s treated as normal. We need more books like this – books where sexuality isn’t the epicenter of a story, but part of its fabric. I loved that.

Performance: The audiobook was read by Jaime Lamchick, who managed to use quite a number of southern accents in a way that didn’t make me cringe at all. Perhaps because they weren’t as exaggerated as so many narrators try to make them. These felt exactly like they belonged to the people in the story. Great job.