Silk & Serif

Received via Netgalley from Curiosity Quills Press in exchange for an honest review.

Rachel is a young woman whose sister has gone missing. In her relentless search for her sister she finds herself lost in an underworld of sex and death. Someone in this world is abducting, and severely torturing girls who have no one to care if they are missing. Is Rachel's sister one? Can Rachel avoid becoming the next victim?

I want to start off by stating that the book does a fantastic job describing what a Schwarzschild Radius is, and being a physics connoisseur I appreciated that. Unfortunately, I felt the description was a bit late in the game, and missed its chance to be something more awe inspiring. The deep philosophical meaning that the Schwarzschild Radius revelation was supposed to reveal arrived a little but too late. It’s a pity because an early revelation would have set up a deep and moving story with two layers: the mystery and the philosophic.
The latent revelation of the story’s deeper meaning also did little to offset the strange reality Rachel lives in. She is apparently a teenager, who is somehow in university. She is allowed to work in a strip club without anyone being suspicious and her parents never question her absences. Mostly I just can’t figure out how someone under 18 is already deeply embedded into college, since graduation age is on average 17 - a few months doesn't make a mature, independent adult.
The awkward relationships, sentence structures and unreality of situations became bothersome early on – and continue to ruin the story. I feel the author tried to make the story much more serious and inspirational than their skill levels. If the author spends some time honing their skills, and revisiting this work I feel this would be a fantastic read. The major detail of age should altered as well to make story more believable..
A great story that requires honing before it should be published to a wider market, but has a fantastic base structure. A good read that could be so much more with just a few tweaks of information timing and some work on character interactions.