Kylie Lee Baker

Cora Zeng is a crime scene cleaner. But the bloody messes don't bother her, not when she's already witnessed the most horrific thing possible: her sister being pushed in front of a train.

But the killer was never caught, and Cora is still haunted by his last words: bat eater.
These days, nobody can reach Cora: not her aunt who wants her to prepare for the Hungry Ghost Festival, not her weird colleagues, and especially not the slack-jawed shadow lurking around her doorframe. After all, it can't be real - can it?

After a series of unexplained killings in Chinatown, Cora believes that someone might be targeting East Asian women, and something might be targeting Cora herself.

Soon, she will learn . . . you can't just ignore hungry ghosts.

and other names for Cora Zeng

Bat Eater

Grace McCarter

But the problem is – has always been – that there are many things Cora does not want, and very few things that she does want.

This is the difference between Yifei and Cora. Yifei turns her pain into a plan, while Cora scrubs her pain away with bloodbuster. 

Cora is aware, all at once, that she should be the one fighting. She’s the one whose sister died because of people like the one Harvey calls Batman. All that anger should be hers. But instead, she’s hiding behind two masks and a baggy hazmat suit, because the thought that she could do anything meaningful never even occured to her. Cora cannot fathom her actions mattering beyond her own mind. She feels herself slump smaller, as if her hazmat suit is eating her alive.

The publisher's blurb describes this book very well.  There was a lot of gore, but the book descriptions make you aware that it will be there.  I think I would have liked this book better if there had been fewer gross descriptions and more actual tension built up.  I generally avoid books set during the pandemic, but this one was all right.  I think the protagonist being a germaphobe would have worked with or without the pandemic setting.  This is a story that most definitely is pushing a particular point of view about the pandemic and about anti-Asian racism.  If those things are going to bother you, the rest of the plot and the horror elements will not overcome that for you.  This was a really good concept, but average in how it was executed.  

Bat Eater and other names for Cora Zeng

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