An Interesting Debut Mystery

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I liked Ace of Spades, I just thought it was overly long and suffered from not enough editing.
I found it hard to feel a connection with the two main characters, Chiamaka and Devin, to the point where I kept forgetting Devon's name! Chiamaka's relationship with Belle was one of the more interesting sections of the book and I honestly wish that the author would have gone through a rigorous editing and restructured to give us more time to explore Chi's relationship with Jamie and Belle.
The "reveal" of Aces and the plot behind the major conflicts is interesting but I don't feel like it was very coherent. The dénouement was confusing and felt a bit anticlimactic.

I listened to the audiobook and there’s an author interview at the end where she explained that she wrote it in freshman year of college (?) after obsessively watching Gossip Girl, so there are quite a few parallels. I think it’s a good debut work and I’m looking forward to her second book, I think it’ll be more polished.