Score! Another excellent books for yours truly! It is rare to have two in a row when it comes to ebooks- I have so many to go through and that makes me fairly picky.

This book got me intrigued right away. I like Cesar (and his bro too) and I would dearly love an >escorted ( )

I read through Witch Hunt pretty fast. Books like this, to me at least, are filler books for when I’m not sure what to read. Or palette cleansers so I can clear my brain for whatever is coming next.

It has your typical urban fantasy feel to it, with magic, mystery and a dash of action thrown in. It was fun to watch Cèsar evade the police, chase after Isobel, and try to clear his name. I was rooting for him the entire time, fist pumping when he got out of sticky situations and getting very attached to his well being.

I raced through it. I devoured it. It’s just that, unless I go back and read the synopsis, I do not remember a single thing about this book. Which, to be fair, is the point of a “filler books” for me.

It’s by far not my favourite urban fantasy read, but I will be continuing the series to see what happens. It did, at the very least, pique my interest for more. ( )

[Cross-posted to Knite Writes]

Plot

A (male) witch named Cesar wakes up one morning with no memory of the night before and a dead woman in his bathtub. Uh oh.

Cesar works for the Office of Preternatural Affairs, a secret government agency that deals with the magic underworld normal people don’t know about. So he immediately calls his colleague, Suzy, and asks for help from the OPA. But the LAPD shows up first and arrests him, and next time Cesar contacts Suzy, she tells him the OPA isn’t coming because they deemed the crime a non-magic-related affair. Cesar is on his own.

Well, that sucks.

Cesar breaks out of prison using magic-induced super strength and goes on the run, trying to figure out who framed him. Because he’s 100% sure he didn’t kill the woman in his bathtub, who happens to be a hot waitress he’s been vying after for weeks. The night before, Cesar was being congratulated for taking down a rogue witch named Black Jack, and he and his coworkers were drinking at the bar called The Olive Pit, where the woman, Erin, worked.

Cesar knows he left with her, but he was uncharacteristically drunk at the time, so he doesn’t remember anything else that happened.

So, he decides to seek help from a necrocognitive woman, Isobel, whom he was recently assigned to locate by the OPA for unspecified reasons. Isobel can speak with the dead, and Cesar hopes that she can talk to Erin and find out the truth about the woman’s murder.

What follows is a convoluted series of fist fights, pseudo-magic fights, run-ins with incubi, and a conspiracy from within the OPA.

Anyway, it turns out that the Silver Needles, the incubi mafia, put a price on Cesar’s head to get back at him for rescuing his sister from their evil clutches a while back. Two OPA agents, a couple of buff, super-strong pseudo-human guys called kopides, let the incubus who put the bounty on Cesar escape so they could get a cut of the winnings. These guys try to kill Cesar at one point, but Cesar outsmarts them and leaves them unconscious in the desert.

Meanwhile, Cesar’s buddy Suzy gets arrested for killing Erin, but it turns out the whole thing was a mix up. Isobel is actually working for Cesar’s boss, investigating corrupt members of the OPA, and she stole Suzy’s gun and accidentally left it at Cesar’s house when she broke in to investigate him. It turns out that Cesar did actually kill Erin…because she was a Gray, a half-succubus, and was in league with the evil incubi after Cesar. She tried to feed on him, and Cesar killed her in self-defense.

In the end, the incubus and kopides guys kidnap Isobel, but Cesar recruits his brother Domingo, also a witch, to help him sneak inside The Olive Pit where she’s being held. It doesn’t quite go as planned. There’s a fight. Cesar’s boss and a bunch of OPA agents show up to save the day, and the bag guys are arrested.

Suzy is released from holding. Cesar’s name is cleared. Isobel and Cesar are now somewhat friendly.

The End.

Cue Sequel.

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My Take

I found this book enjoyable but a bit of a letdown.

First off, the plot got increasingly convoluted as time went on. It started off as the simple “I’ve been framed for murder” plot, but it became harder and harder to follow as the story progressed. There was too much flip-flopping on which characters were allies and not, and whether or not something had actually happened, and…there were places I got lost and couldn’t figure out for the life of me what I supposed to think about a certain event.

Secondly, I didn’t like how the story drops me into the middle of a complex setting without giving me time to adjust. I didn’t really feel anything for most of the characters because the story drops us right into the middle of Cesar’s issues with zero opportunity to learn about his life. He says certain characters should mean certain things — friends, bosses, coworkers, etc. — but I didn’t actually feel any connections to them because I had no opportunity to meet them.

The intermittent appearances of most of the characters didn’t help. The book would let me start to get to know a character, and then Cesar would leave that character’s company, and the next time we came around to that character, Cesar would be looking at him/her in a different light from before, and then I wouldn’t know what to think. It was kind of irritating. I couldn’t get an accurate read on anybody. I didn’t who I was supposed to care about.

Third, I found the pacing a bit wonky at times. It gets way too fast at some points, and that certainly didn’t lend to my understanding of the frankly confusing plot.

Fourth (and finally), Cesar could not stop talking about how hot and sexy the women around him were. Yes, every woman was super sexy and gorgeous and apparently attracted to Cesar. God, I hate it when it authors do that. The protagonist is on the freaking run after being framed for murder, and yet, of course he stops to spend a copious amount of time thinking about how nice the boobs and butts of all the female characters are. Not to mention the gratuitous scantily-clad women scenes. Really?

I mean, if there was a single female character that Cesar liked who came off as sexy? Fine. Cool. But every single one?

Anyway, besides all of those things mentioned above, this was a fairly enjoyable story. There was plenty of action and a lot of good world building (albeit too much of it was crammed into fast-paced scenes). Cesar, despite his shortcomings, was a fun character to follow with a funny personality. The writing was, overall, pretty good. Snappy. Sarcastic. The kind of narration I generally enjoy.

This was a quick and easy read (it’s pretty short), but it had a few flaws that ticked me off.

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Writing

First person. Sarcastic narrator. As I mentioned above. I actually had no qualms about the writing style itself, only the content.

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Is It Worth Reading?

If you really like urban fantasy, then you can’t go too wrong with this. It’s only $2.99 on Amazon, and you can read it in one setting if you want to. It’s not bad. But it’s not especially great either.

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Rating

3/5 ( )

fair adventure but wasn't able to connect with any of the characters ( )

Kind of difficult to review. I’ve never read a book by this author before. I can say that I liked it enough to have picked up some of her electronic books currently offered for free. And I’ll most likely read the next book in this series. There was enough intrigue to keep me going as well as guessing the who and why. The first chapter certainly got my attention. A witch who works for a secret government organization, tracking down witches and demons that are causing trouble, suddenly finds himself with his own problems when waking up with no memories of the night before with his place trashed and a dead woman in his bathtub.

So yes, there is enough there to make things interesting and keep a reader entertained. But a couple of things prevent me from giving this a higher rating. I don’t really feel like I know Cesar Hawke, the main character. We definitely learn things about him and can get a good handle on the type of person he is, but I’m missing the connection I should be feeling in a book told in the first person.

Interesting world and storyline, but more work needs to be done on characterization. I do realize, for this particular story, that for secondary characters, that might have been on purpose.

The author seems to take shortcuts to get the character out of no-win situations; overwhelmed in numbers, but somehow gets out and pretty much says, don’t ask me how.

I can appreciate the story-telling talents of the author, but I know the story could be so much better, perhaps with the help of an editor. To me, the story is better than okay, but not quite worth 4 stars. But the author is worth a second look. ( )