This book was mediocre and the ending was bad.

It bills itself as a "battle of the sexes," but it's terribly uncreative in this effort. The women behave the way her caricatures of the men accuse them of behaving, and the men are worse. There's no redeeming nuance or trope – it's just: women are emotional and men are pigs. But it lacks any sort of moral dilemma or sticky situation to make the reader sympathize with either camp. The story also does not do a good job of arriving at any sort of jokerfied moral of "we're all monsters when pushed past our limits," and instead resolves to "I'm so lonely that I miss my rapist," which I swear to god is as jarring of a non-sequitur in the story as it is in my summary.

A woman who works at a food packing plant snaps one evening after her degenerate wastoid husband Kenji lays hands upon her. She strangles him to death and recruits some of her coworkers to help dispose of the body. Kenji 1000% deserved to die, so we're on board. In trying to arrange the plans and cover up the murder though, the women proceed to behave about as creatively as I would expect from a misogynistic author who hates women. They can't keep a secret for more than 2 minutes, they screech emotionally in public while discussing secret plans, and are unwilling to lay in the bed they've made for themselves. Simultaneously, the male detectives are incompetent, distrusting, and condescending. The writing to this point, though, has not been bad – I just haven't cared for any of the characters. This is 7/10 territory.

However, in the final act, Masako –the ring leader of body disposal– is finally hunted down by Satake, the crazed and depraved loan shark who's business is being hurt by their disposal of people who owe him money kills Satake but immediately feels pangs of guilt and remorse. This is coming from the woman who has lost no sleep chopping up the bodies of people she knows and extorting her coworkers into helping her do so. But now she feels sad that the man who had just violently (like w/a knife) raped her is gone. This sexual Stockholm Syndrome development comes out of nowhere and left such a bad taste in my mouth. Perhaps this is the conclusion of her actions – she becomes a broken monster herself who can now only seek her jollies from someone who wants to kill her, like Satake could only seek his jollies from someone he wanted to kill, but it just seems like such a degraded narrative movement by the time that it happens that I didn't feel like the "moral spotlight being shone inwards" effect bore any scrutiny whatsoever. It's just sexually deviant and freaky (which is bad) and coming at the cost of exploiting the "battle of the sexes" trope (which is bad) and together the outcome is in poor taste.

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