Brought to you by OBS reviewer Heidi

After a devastating standoff, with her former coven that ended with her being the only witch left standing, Samantha has moved to San Francisco for a new start.  She is a homicide detective in a new city with a new partner, Lance, and is staying with an old school friend, Jill.

Samantha is welcoming a calm new start to her new life, but she quickly learns that won’t be what she gets when Lance and her start investigating a murder that has witch magic all over it.  She’s been trying to quit using magic and deny her witch heritage, but this case may force her to use the very powers she wants to hide.

I really wanted to like this book, honest!  I just …. didn’t.  I found the characters to be a bit bland and I just couldn’t get invested in any of them, and therefore I really didn’t care one way or another what happened to them.  The only one that I sort of liked was Anthony and he was hardly in the book at all.

I also found that I just couldn’t stay focused on this storyline.  My mind was often wandering while I was reading the book and was overall pretty bored.  It’s not like the whole ‘I don’t want to use my powers, but circumstances are forcing me to’ plot line hasn’t been done again and again.  And, this book just failed to pull it off for me.

I will say when the timequakes started happening and Samantha was trying to decide if somebody was messing with her or if she was losing her mind, it reminded me a lot of the movie Shutter Island.  That thread in the storyline was probably the story’s saving grace.

The ending was the final straw in making me dislike this book so much.  I was thinking that *finally* something was happening and it was going to get good and then it just stopped.  Not the storyline, but the book just ended unexpectedly.  There was no conclusion to the book, not until you read the next installment that is.

Overall I had high expectations for this novel, but ultimately it fell severely short and I’m not so sure that I’m even going to bother with the remainder of the series.