Cabaret in Flames by Hache Pueyo

TL;DR: Good but not quite five stars.
Source: NetGalley, thank you so much to the publisher!

Plot: Ariadne is looking for her missing mentor and gets caught in a bigger web.
Characters: Interesting but not super unique.
Setting: Not much can be said about the setting, it served well but it wasn’t a strong part of the narrative.
Horror: This might have been the lacking point for me, but it could work stronger for others.

Summary:

Guls can be brutal. Few know this better than Ariadne, who lost half her body to their appetites, but their brutality is a predictable constant amid Brazil’s political chaos. Now, she treats them in the specialized clinic she inherited from Erik Yurkov—the mentor who rescued her as a child, trained her in medicine, built her prostheses, and disappeared without a trace.

Ariadne’s routine is disturbed when Quaint knocks on her door: a charming, tattooed gul claiming to be Erik’s oldest friend. Quaint suspects foul play in Erik’s disappearance, and they soon discover Erik sought asylum at Cabaré, an infamous club in Rio de Janeiro frequented by the gul elite.

Together, Ariadne and Quaint will unravel the conspiracy behind their friend’s disappearance, navigate the labyrinthine world of Ariadne’s memories, and discover what Erik means to them—and what they are starting to mean to each other.

Thoughts:

The timing on the release of this book couldn’t be any better. Ariadne is searching for her mentor who vanished some time ago. An old friend of his appears and he begins to assist her with the hunt. Along the way she finds out truth about her own history, and the politics around her. Surprise surprise, it’s got to do with abuse, both of power and girls.

The horror in this focused almost entirely in on Ariadne and her past and the memories we find her trapped in. As Ariadne is triggered we see what she suffered through, vaguely for the most part. There is ample possibility for on page horror as the Gul (a type of flesh eating vampire) are all around her, but we stay tightly in Ariadne.

While not as good for me as Hache Pueyo’s previous work I think this is going to work well for a lot of people and it’s timing is perfect. A dark and interesting journey for one woman to heal, this one is a great read.