Something about Witches by Joey W. Hill
Series: Arcane Shot #1
Published by Berkley
Published on: February 7th 2012
Genres: Paranormal Romance
Pages: 312
Format: Paperback
Source: Borrowed
Amazon | Book Depo | GoodReads
Ruby Night Divine is a gun shop owner. She's also a witch who knows magic can fail. She's experienced it first hand, with full-blown tragic consequences.
A powerful sorcerer, Derek is determined to get to the bottom of why Ruby pushed him away and ran three years before.
Something about Witches provides an assortment of really clever details that get lost in the shuffle. Ruby Night Divine, a woman with a three-tier name, runs a gun store, after having previously worked at a magical shop.
This switch from spells to bullets merits a couple chapters of reflection. Instead we are provided with a page. Granted, this page is blessedly dense, putting us for this fraction of a second into the head of an arms supplier who wishes well.
Then we have a very Shakespearean set-up at a brothel. Neither Ruby nor the lover she has spurned for a little while know the other one is there. Cue masked meet-up.
I was happily surprised to find that, although a romance and a fairly sexual one, the explicit love scenes are kept to a reasonable size and few to no plumbing network metaphors are invoked. In this type of genre, one does not anticipate the most pulse-stirring plot (that merit is saved for the love scenes) but I did appreciate the fact it is not cookie-cutter.
There is no fear here to give the characters quirks or, in some cases, to make them deplorable. This reflection, however, returns me to my initial frustration. Too many of these individuating qualities and everybody feels a mite shallow or only gussied up like a wedding cake, exotically designed on the outside but vanilla on the inside.
I think a lot of this stale energy emanates from Derek Stormwind, the previously mentioned spurned lover. He keeps alive the old cowboy spirit, one I just don’t get the appeal of. And then quite contrary to this image, he is also a centuries old sorcerer. Huh? Why of all costume designs did he get hung up on the Wild Wild West?
In the end, you do get more than what the cover leads you to believe. A lot of very strange characteristics are exhibited by these people. Unfortunately, majority if not all of them are expressed to no end. The romantic dimension engulfs all others.
| Books in this series: | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
  |
  |
|||
