I have been struggling with this manhwa for almost five months. And while it is a long one, with over 160 chapters, it was a chore to actually go troughs it. Of course, other things tickled my fancy so it's not only the quality of the manhwa that propelled me to read it for such a long time.. but overall, this was meh.
Where to start. I don't feel like wasting too much time on this one, so I'll try to be brief. This isn't a detective novel in the slightest. There is a central mystery and some detective elements, but so little and inconsequential. This is a shojo cleverly masked in a semi-mystery-fantasy surroundings. As I noted, there are some good elements here. The whole background of the story, with the witches, mana drainers, the secret magical items, is actually pretty solid and could have been made into an okay soft fantasy. But sadly, things shift uncontrollably from a boring murder mystery, to a slice of life, to a romance novel, to a female empowerment, to some totally random supporting characters that just appear and dissapear... Yep, I found this story flow pretty much terrible and the number of characters to inflated for no reason. We even have a few promising chars that just dissapear for no reason (looking at you, Rosemary).
But the ML and FL are... Hard to really gauge. Kate had some major awesome moments in the beginning, when she was just an inquisitive maid that looked after herself very well. IMHO, the story actually ruins her character by making her a secret heiress and whatnot. She becomes the typical boring shojo heroine, pure as snow and almost without a bad toughts in herself (Jeffery Hogan gets her on the edge of her seat, but otherwise she's perfect). The ML is sooooo boring. I understand that he's a type of a tsundere, but he's neither sexy, smoldering, likable or anything. He just looks good, and acts like a total psychopath, with no human emotions whatever. While having such a character may not be necessarily bad, having him for a ML in what is basically a shojo manhwa ia MAJOS misstep.
And other things that irked me... Enoch Rainforrest suddenly appears and starts acting like a jerk right of the bat. The bad guys are such laughable caricatures it's almost sad. Duke Evans is underused, but he's actually a morally ambiguous man and a fabulous character but it's never shown properly. Josephine Court's character was ruined as you see she was written to fall under the wrong influence (trust me, it wasn't subtle at all). So many story threads simply go nowhere. Jade was cute and the other detectives were at least nice. The lore needed more work on, but is not features heavily enough as it is. The world-building feels too thin mostly because of that.
Overall, this was a miss IMHO. It's not terrible, and the art is well made, but all the things of substance were lacking. Skip unless you are a completist.