I sadly really did not enjoy this and had to push myself through from pretty much the beginning. The writing style is very confusing. Felt like every sentence was made to sound the most complicated they could just for the sake of it. The biggest vocabulary for every word. Just felt like you couldn’t even get into the story because the writing was just all over the place

There's far too much exposition in this novel, and not enough dialogue. I kept getting lost in the middle of beautifully written sentences.
The master of this particular kind of novel was George Eliot. She clearly mixed these kinds of sentences with tightly plotted storylines.

In the first part, we have Cleo, who is an astute and practical art advisor at a New York auction house.
We witness her meeting her client Staecker, and how he wants more than business, and Cleo’s thoughts on this.
Next parts come, and we meet Slaht, who has weird principles and is playing a weird game. The Pascale in Miami, with Rosemary, Slaht and Staecker. Verdoyer and Peels are interesting characters - the rest, not so much.
I actually wrote a comprehensive review but lost it when my connection was lost.
I am trying to put everything I had said in that review.
- I had high expectations based on the blurb.
- The highlights were the author’s expertise in languages, Ancient Greek, in particular, and their grasp of the setting. I enjoyed their commentary on some lifestyles and aspects of life.
Overall, this was a miss for me. The prose, the plot, the characterisation and the commentary did not work as a coherent story.
I value the author’s knowledge and would be happy to try their other work. This was not my cup of tea - yet, I am sure there is an audience for this book and I wish the book the best journey.

There’s some very compelling aspects of this novel. The pacing and characterization, in particular, but also flashes of beauty and clever humor in the writing as well. I think the work was strong enough to withstand a more rigorous editorial approach—particularly at the level of the sentence, many of which lose focus and tend to dampen the frequently musical quality of the prose. I like the book’s narrative approach, that of a highly observant mind simultaneously taking in new data and recognizing, then describing characters’ patterning and motivations. There’s a kind of roving intellectual insight that’s amassing more and more data—this is intriguing to experience as a reader as the book roams across characters and vignettes (but the risk with this style is that. it is also regularly overwrought—which is where stronger editorial support could have helped to shape the book).