Hallie works as a skip tracer – hunting down people wanted by the law, for one reason or another. It’s not glamourous, and it doesn’t pay all that well. But it’s legal work, and that’s hard to come by in low city.

When her best – and only – friend calls her in a panic, Hallie goes to help and gets a lot more than she bargained for. One of the elite has been murdered and the city police and special investigators are looking for someone to blame.

The moment Hallie is near a dead body of one of the ruling class, her hard work and clean record count for nothing. She just becomes a usual suspect. Worse, the real killer also wants Hallie dead.

Can she stay ahead of the investigators long enough to find the real killer and bring them to justice?

British fantasy author, Vanessa Nelson, has published twenty-five books in five series since her debut novel in 2018. I decided to try out her lastest series, The Fractured Conclave, There are two books already in print and the third is due for release next month. I was hoping that ‘A Usual Suspect‘ (2024) was going to pull me into a new Urban Fantasy series.

It stared well. I was dropped straight into the action in the complex but intriguing world that Hallie lives in. Initially, my head was full of more questions than answers but they were questions that tickled my curiosity and got me speculating. For intance, the collective noun for non-humans was Veondkin. My search engine said Veond was a version of Feend in Middle English – an enemy and or a devil.  Humans were referred to as Karlen which I thought might be from Old German meaning Freeman. I was intrigued and keen to learn more. I also liked that the plot had a slightly grimy, noirish feel.

Hallie’s world had a lot of potential for drama and intrigue It was heavily stratified and segregated, with Hallie’s species, the Karlen, living at the bottom in poverty that they survive by working in family clans and the physically superior hochlen at the top, living lives of wealth and privilege. In between were the  Veondkin a fae-like set of creatures with magic at their fingertips.

Hallie is a bit of an outsider among the Karlen and is estranged from most of her family because of an incident that I was waiting patiently to get the details of which seems to have altered her physically so that she’s not quite human.

I liked the plot, which put Hallie in the middle of a covert struggle between the hochlen and had her being hunted as the suspected murderer of a high-ranking hochlen.

I was less happy with some of some of the writing about the mechanics of moving through the plot. I felt it should have been tightened to take out the padding.

After the first third of the book, it seemed to me that the story started to lose momentum. At 58% I reluctantly set the book aside.

I’m sure that there was an interesting story in there somewhere but it wasn’t holding my attention. The prose was too clunky, the worldbuilding was too slow and I was tired of Hallie being kidnapped to move the plot forward.