I really wanted to like this

I wanted to be able to say "this is why you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover," but sadly, the cover was more than representative of the book itself- not very good.
I discovered, after the fact, that this is a follow-up to a trilogy. That explains a lot. While it does more or less (more less!) stand on its own, there's a lot of missing context and character development (the latter, I'm going to have to assume happened in the trilogy, but as it is, the characters feel like cut-outs. And oh my gosh, the main character was awful. The classic "gorgeous woman doesn't know she's gorgeous which makes men want her even more" trope. And she's a goth, apparently? Although you would never know it, apart from a few brief mentions of Doc Marten boots and a black wardrobe, and one guy calling her a gothic [slur]. It was so cheap...
There's an evil cult that we never actually learn anything about, other than that it heavily featured in the other books, and this book's villain is in it. Like, that's it. The world-building was hot garbage, the plot was surprisingly slow and lacking in suspense, and the writing, in general, was not great. And then there was the narrator, who, when doing straight narration wasn't bad, but when he was doing character voices was comically awful, His American woman sounded EXACTLY the same as his American man, and both of them had dreadful accents. The poor guy shouldn't have even tried to do different voices. He just can't.
Like I said. I wanted to like this. The premise sounded fun, with themes that I get a kick out of. I'm disappointed.

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