The world is the selling point and it has grown. The OtherWorld was a gothic backdrop in book one and here it becomes a system with departments, rules and people enforcing them badly, and every time a new layer of that machinery appeared I wanted another hour of it. The humour survives the tonal shift, mostly through Big D, who remains the best-value supporting character in the series and who I am now convinced needs his own volume.

The audio is where this becomes hard to argue with. Seven narrators, duet style, and it never once sounds like a committee: Maxine Mitchell and Andi Eloise carry the emotional weight between them, and the full cast means the OtherWorld's functionaries all have distinct voices instead of one actor doing a Scottish accent and hoping. The first book's audiobook made a believer out of me and this one is a better production, which I did not expect to be writing.

Now the part I could not ignore, because it cost me something. The story moves between past and present, and it moves often. A reviewer I agree with said the timeline structure was what held her back, that the jumps kept breaking her connection with the story just as she was getting invested, and I had the same experience in the middle third, repeatedly. There is a point around the fifth hour where I had been pulled out of a scene twice in twenty minutes, and I set my headphones down and made a cup of coffee in a slightly aggrieved way. It is not a structural failure, the two strands do pay each other off by the end, and I suspect the payoff is the reason the authors kept the structure. But in audio specifically it is a harder ask than it is in print, because you cannot glance at a chapter heading to reorient yourself, and a couple of those transitions would have been friendlier with a verbal marker.

My second note is smaller and, I think, fair: this one assumes you remember the first in detail. It picks up threads and characters with very little hand-holding, and one reviewer openly wished for a recap of the main beats. I had listened to Grim only a few months earlier and still spent the opening chapters digging through my memory for who owed what to whom. Anyone arriving fresh should start with book one anyway, so this is a mild complaint rather than a real one, but a two-minute recap at the top would have made a long book easier to enter.

Those are the two things I would change, and everything else I would protect. The prose is more confident than in the first volume, the ending lands with real force, and the cliffhanger is the kind that makes you check the release schedule rather than reach for a complaint. Eleven and a half hours is a good length for this story, long enough to earn the grief and short enough that the dual timeline does not wear out its welcome.

If you are starting here rather than with the first volume: don't. Grim comes first, and about an hour into this one you will understand exactly why.