Despite opening with a brazen shooting in the middle of a restaurant, the bland writing left me disinterested by the end of the excerpt. Practically every sentence of Maud's first-person perspective starts with "I," and all around it features too much "telling" and not enough "showing," even in the midst of action sequences. We don't get to see characters and their histories develop, we're simply told who they are in a serious of info-dump paragraphs every time somebody new is introduced.