Red Queen (Antonia Scott, #1) by Juan Gomez-Jurado

​An ultimate crime prevention premise must feature a genius and someone to handle them. In other words, it’s your very basic odd/oddly unmatched pair of detectives sort of thing. It’s been done and it’s been done and I can’t honestly tell you that Red Queen brings something new to either the genre of that very particular set up.
In fact, it’s quite underwhelming as far as those things go. Because, of course, you got to get your Sherlock right. Meaning the oddball has to be originally compellingly odd and Antonia Scott is garden variety odd at best.
She’s meant to be a genius, a person with the highest IQ out there. And of course, she’s traumatized, because trauma forges the best character traits. Though maybe not in her case so much; in her case, it just made her into an emotionally stunted shut-in with a crappy diet. And then she gets dragged out once again into the field to track down a kidnapper/killer. And then man to drag her out is a jumbo-sized (and allegedly mostly muscle) police detective who veered off the blue path to follow his morals and the only way to get out of the doodoo he’s in now is by working with Antonia.
And so, the two of them chase after their mystery fiend all over Madrid. Which is nice locale wise and was one of the main things that attracted me to this novel in the first place.
So, score for international reading. 
And objectively, the book was plenty entertaining and perfectly decently written. Just…nothing special. Much like its protagonist. Which is frustrating because  she's meant to be exceptional and, presumably, exceptionally interesting. Plus, the book is quite bulky at something like 400 pages. Certainly not enough here to draw interest for the entire trilogy.
It’s sort of like an inferior version of Kill The Father (Colomba Casselli trilogy) by Sandrone Dazieri. So if you want to read a genius and detective team solve crimes books done right, go for those.
Otherwise, this was fine, passed the time, some fun was had. Thanks Netgalley.