Clare Azzopardi has built her crime story on a playful twist: her protagonist has no crime author of her own, so she invents one. The book introduces Inspector Castillo, the lead in what the author calls a metacrime novel, meaning a crime story that thinks about crime stories. Castillo works the case with femaleness and motherhood never far from her mind, and those concerns shape how she reads victims, suspects and evidence. Azzopardi keeps the genre's usual furniture, a body, an investigation, but points it at questions crime fiction tends to leave in the corner. The invented author inside the plot gives the novel room to ask where women's voices belong in a form long shaped by men. Readers still get a mystery to follow, but the real engine here is character and how identity bends the way a detective sees everything.