REVIEW: Witch Slap (The Hollowbeck Paranormal Cozy Mysteries Book 1) by Amelia Ash and Kim M. Watt
Never let your brother date a witch, lest they get turned into a talking cat.
Morgan Winters wants an ordinary life:
A job at a bookstore, an apartment she can barely afford, and a healthy amount of existential dread. Her brother (AKA “The Ruiner”) ruins that when he shows up on her bedroom windowsill, transformed into a talking cat.
He claims it’s due to a date gone horribly wrong, but Morgan’s not buying it. Still, when he begs her to take him to a witch who can change him back into a human, she reluctantly agrees. Family is family.
When they arrive in Hollowbeck – a suspiciously small and suspiciously magical town – they find the witch.
Only she’s dead.
And there’s a letter left behind – with Morgan’s name on it.
Even though no one knew she was coming.
Morgan could run. She could hide. But she’s not the type. She’s determined to stick her nose into the middle of the supernatural, figure out who left her the letter, find the murderer – and hopefully sort out Ruiner’s cat problem before he leaves another hairball on the rug.
Dear Ladies,
I have a cat who looks very much like the one on the cover so of course I had to check out this book. Sometimes I wonder what my cats would tell me if they could speak. Other times I’m sure I’d rather not know what they’re thinking. Morgan gets to hear plenty of what her no-good brother feels about everything.
Morgan has a so-so life of getting by – ditching her cheating husband, working in a ratty bookstore, and living in a ratty apartment above a porn shop. Then Ruiner (her nickname for him) shows up one rainy night, pawing at her window to get in. Morgan has always run to bail Ruiner out of whatever fix he’s got himself into but this time? Now he’s a cat and needs her to take him somewhere to get a witch to un-cat him. If only that was going to work. Now with a witch dead, her spell book missing, and some suspicious townspeople wondering who killed Norma and where her book went – and there are reasons why everyone is twitchy about this – Morgan and Ruiner need to figure out what’s going on before the killer comes for them.
I enjoyed the idea of Ruiner as a cat but wow, he’s a little shit and apparently always has been. Ruiner is a better being as a cat as at least cats get a bye on being little shits. I can’t imagine having him as a human brother. When he finally calls Morgan on her life choices though, I kind of have to agree with him. She’s also the one who insisted on staying in town after the lone policeman tells her to when Ruiner argued with her that they should just skip town. Due to the policeman, there’s a reason why they might have been able to do this as well as, due to the town, some reasons why it might not have worked anyway.
Morgan is the type of person who obeys rules and who has tried to fix Ruiner’s mistakes for years even while it irks her to do this. She also loves books, bookshops, and libraries so she’s got that character merit going for her. But she can also make some wild accusations at times while at others, she can be dogged in trying to solve what’s going on. So yes both Ruiner and Morgan alternately entertained me and also annoyed me at times.
The town of Hollowbeck is quirky and lovingly described. I’d almost want to stroll down the streets, sit at an outdoor cafe and people/familiar watch. The Whitchinn sounds like an interesting place to stay and I guess I’d get used to the frogs everywhere in it.
Pacing seems to dawdle for parts of the book and there are plenty of characters to get to know but they’re not all dumped on the reader at the same time. There’s a lot of telling with descriptions though and at times the tone is darker than the quirky book I thought I was getting. Things really pick up in the last quarter of the story but at the same time, I’m still not quite sure why the murderer struck when they did. The identity of the killer is solved but there are some untied threads left to take us into the next book which I am interested in reading as Ruiner is still a cat at the end of this book and there are now major changes in Morgan’s life which makes me hope that she’s over always picking up after Ruiner. This one for me is a B-
~Jayne
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