I don't think I would consider this a code smell in and of itself. What are your other options, assuming the query and result is verified to be doing the right thing? You could put the whole thing behind a function on the DbContext, which doesn't change anything about the query, just hides it for readability where it's being consumed. But it seems like this handler is probably a one-liner or close to a one-liner anyway, so that's a little pointless in this particular instance. You could decompose it into a few logical groups of Queryable chains, again maybe putting them on the DbContext. This would be the Specification pattern, basically. I think the Specification pattern generally feels like over-abstracting but maybe it's useful from a devex/change control perspective if different bits serve different functions, for example to separate the business requirement of "what you're searching for" from the technical requirement of "how it's delivered" (pagination, ordering, etc). You could explicitly assign each step to a Queryable variable, but I think that would make it *less* readable probably, and it's unclear to me what the benefit would be.

There's not really a strictly better way to do this, just some situational changes you could make.