I am honestly stunned by how good this book is. Usually, with books like these, there is something fishy going on. Released almost half a year ago, with an average rating of almost 4.5 but only 445 ratings, and not a single bad review, this very much reeks like some low-effort crap trap for a quick buck.
Books rarely stay undiscovered like this for this long if there isn't a very good reason for it.
But this one might actually be an exception for once.
Don't get me wrong, this book is far from perfect and its current average rating is definitively overblown, but this is easily better than 95% of urban fantasy that was released in the last few years.
Sadly this isn't saying much though but credit where credit is due.
I am a bit surprised by the primary category being Urban Fantasy here. This book very much gave me science-fantasy (sci-fi with magic) vibes. It reminds me of B.R. Kingsolvers Magitek. But I guess that also counts as Urban Fantasy for some strange reason.

Be warned, this is more of a feedback review I guess.

Let me first briefly talk about the audiobook narration which for sure has negatively affected my experience with this book. Here and there the narrator shows that she is able to hit fitting inflections and facilitate the content of the book. But she frequently falls into this rhythmic and detached narration voice which dulls any emotion the underlying text is trying to convey. It's not monotone per-say but it has the same effect. It sounds like one would read the closing line of a fairytale "and then they lived happily ever after" but constantly. There are better words for this but I can't think of any.

But now let's get to the actual book. Initially, the book has some problems with tone inconsistency.
The story starts with a bang, the MC discovers a gruesome scene and then quickly finds herself outnumbered and fighting for her life. The book tries to describe these murders in visceral and horrifying language and shows us how it emotionally impacts the MC and her crew, but at the same time, they trade witty one-liners while they slice and rip apart their enemies with body parts, innards, and fluids covering everything. And they joke about the ick-factor which is in stark contradiction with the supposed horror they experienced prior. They unintentionally appear like psychos which actually becomes relevant later on in the story but I don't think the author intended this connection at all.
This makes it very hard to empathize with her horror over the discovered crime itself and completely undermines the impact the previous scene was supposed to have.
This kind of thing is a problem throughout but it is much less pronounced later on.
You have to decide on a tone! You can not just switch between joking casualness and being deeply horrified willy-nilly.
You can not eat the cake and have it too.

Now to a different point.
I would have loved for a longer-lasting real lingering aftermath of her stint in white torture prison. Initially, it seemed like this was the intention but it ultimately went away far too quickly. The impact of the experience was described far too well and in too much detail for it to just go away like that.

I wouldn't have minded for this book to be 200 pages longer at all. Especially the part where they track down the culprit and and are being led around by their noses was a very good setup but the author didn't invest the time to actually make it interesting. The ultimate resolution was so quick that it almost felt like exposition. Yes, she went to various people and talked and fought a bit but it all just felt too effortless. Things just happened too quickly without me getting any background on anything. There was more than enough just in the last third of this book to fill 4 separate books in the series but it was all glossed over so quickly. The book is aiming for fast-paced. But if your book becomes a summary of itself it's no longer fast-paced. It actually becomes less engaging and it makes it harder to stay invested.

This leads me to my biggest gripe, the angel. He is just so unbelievably stupid. And I don't mean this as a description of the character. I mean he is actually too stupid to be believable as a character. And most of the story hinges on this stupidity. I think it might have worked better if there were more excuses for his behavior. We never actually see the evidence he is presented with. We never find out how they actually fooled his lie-detection ability. I would have loved to see more background and detail to basically everything. So many exciting parts of the story stayed entirely unexplored. And this also leaves me with this bitter after-taste that it is entirely possible that this is because none of it is in any way planned or designed to be consistent. It very well might be that all the tidbits that make up the last third of the book were made up on the spot without consideration of how any of it would impact the world around it. Is the MC rich or poor? How much do you earn as a guild assassin? Expensive spells and potions are mentioned repeatedly but they use it all willy-nilly. Is this like a one-week paycheck kind of expensive or one decade? How do they compare? What about the drone cameras and the tech witch? What are the limitations of all of this?
Maybe the author is maintaining an internal wiki brandon-sanderson style to keep track of all the world-building. But I really can't tell.

Now to a bit more nitpicky detail.
The MCs name is Tru. Maybe this is a me-thing but while listening to this as an audiobook it constantly lead to me having to parse sentences twice because I first heard "true" until the context revealed this was actually her name. This is particularly annoying because the angel sometimes says "Truth" to confirm truthfulness. But sometimes he just says "Tru" to get her attention and I can understand that the narrator was unable to consistently pronounce them distinctively enough to keep them apart reliably.

While I am already in the business of dispensing unsolicited advice, I think part of the reason why this book struggles to find its audience is the cover and the title. It so very much sounds like some low-effort dystopian YA garbage and I found myself checking more than once if YA had been tagged, and if it were I would have avoided this book altogether and this isn't helped by the blurb either.
Don't get me wrong, I am actually on board with the whole unicorn rainbow color thing as it happens in the story itself, but I think it is almost impossible to present rainbow hair on a cover in a way that doesn't seem cheesy and juvenile. Especially not with this title font on top of it. I don't dislike the cover from an art perspective. It looks cool. But it doesn't look like it would be on the cover of a book I might enjoy.
This goes back to the inconsistency in tone. There are parts of the book that actually very much sound like a YA superhero trash story and she is overpowered enough for this to fit as well. Braindead-witty one-liners, everyone is a killer badass sexy millionaire assassin that is super famous and also super secret and mysterious everyone knows and also nobody knows, and so on. You see what I'm saying?
But then the book demonstrates that there is at least a chance for much more depth behind this shallow first impression. ( )