Laugh all you want at my New Year’s Eve plans of comfortably snuggling up on the couch with my beagle mix and a nice bottle of sparkling grape juice, but I’d much rather live this antisocial loser lifestyle than run the risk of getting stuck at a celebration that falls through increasingly hellish levels of unreality as party crashers murder everyone over and over and over again.

The sugar rush is more than enough excitement for me.

Unfortunately for protagonist Kembral Thorne, the only hound she’ll be spending most of the night with is less actual canine and more on-the-nose job title as a member of the Hound’s guild (think law enforcement — detective work, search and rescue, protection duty, etc.), as she is rudely wrenched from her maternity leave to figure out WTF is going on in this unexpectedly bloody Groundhog Day scenario. 

Like any good Hound with her nose to the ground, Kembral follows the scent of this unexpected case through deeper and deeper echoes of the Prime reality — I like to think of it comparably to the Telephone game in which each echo gets a bit further and further from the truth, with escalating inhospitality — ranging out into a world that is complicated enough to be as unpredictable as it is intriguing, and complex enough to keep the reader comfortably off-balance without becoming overwhelmed, thankfully. That said, no matter how far Kembral ventures away from the party, the scent always leads her back to a mysterious clock at the center of it all, one that just so happens to trigger the loop with chimes that seemingly feed on bloodshed.

As professionally dependable as Kembral is, I don’t see how anyone can blame a Hound for being immediately distracted when a rather charismatic Cat saunters into the party before all hell breaks loose. Seeing as Rika Nonesuch’s equally on-the-nose job title comes with the membership to a guild valued for its far-less-lawful leanings, it should surprise no one that this Selina-Kyle-esque Cat and very-much-not-Bruce-Wayne Hound have a rather precarious relationship that has fallen onto unsure footing after a couple of encounters pushed them away from their playfully antagonistic history towards something more guarded and spiteful.

The angst is immediately apparently as Kembral and Rika trade sarcastic barbs and distrusting glares, licking their wounds over recent acts of betrayal; and you better believe I was giddily kicking my feet as their Catradora dynamic hit its stride — I know I keep comparing Rika to cat characters, but this time it’s largely because of their similar proficiency in calling someone an “idiot” with affection, with exasperation, with amusement, and with frustration (everyone watch She-Ra and the Princesses of Power) — as they’re forced to begrudgingly work together to figure out exactly what’s going on. Admittedly their tumultuous arc of sapphic idiocy — if you ignore your feelings you can’t be embarrassed by them — to understanding holds no real surprise, but again, I point to my feet. They cannot be dissuaded from kicking.

I’ll leave the unpredictability to the corrupt politicians, violent guests, string-pulling benefactors, and that damn ticking clock. 

Honestly, party hats off to author Melissa Caruso; boredom has just as much potential as a seemingly impervious, sword-wielding being to become the book’s Big Bad seeing as a largely fixed location, time loop story can get bogged down in the repetition (there’s a reason so many of those stories resort to montages), but I never grew tired of the premise in The Last Hour Between Worlds. The tension remained high, the threats remained ever present, the mysteries remained aplenty, and, you guessed it, the feet remained giddily kicking.