I read this so quickly and found it so hard to put down. Again, it's a genre I rarely read but what a book! Cora, daughter of a Chinese man and a white American mother, lives in New York with her half-sister Delilah, who is beautiful and arty and dreams of becoming a model, when Covid begins. After Delilah is pushed under a subway train by a stranger, Cora becomes a crime scene cleaner and starts noticing a huge number of murder victims seem to be young East-Asian women, and as strange events keep happening, her and her two colleagues Harvey and Yifei start to investigate. 

In the afterword, Kylie Lee Baker writes that the pandemic has changed the world because of "the way we sacrificed the elderly and disabled on the altar of capitalism, the way trust in the government and the CDC swiftly dissolved, and the way we as a country still haven't learned not to scapegoat an entire race of people in times of fear". Of course she is writing about the US but it feels true in so many countries. 

I tend to avoid COVID content like the plague (sorry), I avoid novels set during COVID, I hate TV shows that tried to show us their version of COVID. The COVID episodes of Grey's Anatomy are the absolute worst. 

But in a gory, graphic horror novel about racism and ghosts and alienation, with a heroine who suffers from OCD and cleans "people's entrails for a living" I found that it felt like a more sincere and a more genuine depiction. 

Free ARC sent by Netgalley.