The Descent of Monsters

This is the third novella in the Tensorate series. It's got a new protagonist and a wildly different style, sounding much more like a fantasy noir detective investigating a mystery. There's also different tonal shifts between chapters themselves, as some chapters are written as reports to authorities, some are redacted transcripts of interviews, while others are unfiltered journal entries. Overall, this is a very different feeling book than the previous two but I really enjoyed the read.

As a mystery proper, it feels much less about the "whodunnit" (as arguably the second book did) and more about the "what" and the "why". It's very clear from the get go that the authorities are almost certainly at fault here, somehow. There's also a strong horror element of investigating a gory scene while the perpetrator is almost certainly around, but I'd argue that it's secondary to the mystery theme as the "horror climax" takes place largely off-page and is only briefly described in a transcript.

The ending feels a bit like an abrupt cliffhanger, but it also does fit satisfyingly for both the genre and the protagonist, as well as gently continuing the larger arc plot. This is maybe just me complaining about the length of a novella, but I do wish there was a little bit more resolution after the final reveal.

(An ongoing gender details update: it's implied that one character has changed to using they/them pronouns at some point before this book. It's a small one-off comment, but it was honestly very refreshing to just have a character who made one decision about their gender and then later made another. It's not something you see much.)