This book starts off as being very promising, with many of the introduced characters having sordid private lives. These revelations about what happens behind their closed doors provide fodder enough to give any one of them a reason for being the murderer, making this whodunit a tricky one to figure out. However, many of these red herring trails drag on for too long and are not properly tied up, instead left to abruptly be discarded. This issue, along with an overemphasis on minute and unnecessary details, slows the pacing to the point that you almost forget a murder is being investigated. I did still want to see if to the end, but when I reached it, I was extremely disappointed to see the author used a problematic representation of Middle Easterners that played to negative stereotypes and was shocking to see in such a currently released book. If not for this, the book would have earned three stars, but I found the last thirty or so pages very unsettling.