This was... Rather disappointing. I know that at some point I really wanted to read a whole lot of these books, so maybe an earlier book in the series was more engaging. This is called a "mystery" on the cover, and while crimes happen, I usually consider mystery to be somewhat about the solving of said mystery. For the most part the characters which are quite actively in the story, are not contributing much to the solving, they are the "subject" of the crimes involved, not committing them, and not solving them. Don't really know that I'd even consider it "crime fiction" that much. Still, there were some powerful bits in it. I'd just go with something earlier in the series, and maybe having done that work up to this one.