Review: Wormwood Summer (San Amaro Investigations #1) by Kai Butler

SiriusB Reviews Category / B- Reviews / C Reviews Category / C+ Reviewsfantasy m/m romance / Urban-Fantasy2 Comments

Parker Ferro owes the fae his life. They’ve come to collect.

When the Summer Queen summons Parker to her court, the private investigator knows there’s trouble brewing. Trapped into compliance by his past debt to the fae monarch, he’s tasked with locating a missing girl in San Amaro. Now he has to find the girl or give up his life.
Things only get more complicated when a very familiar cop asks Parker for his help on a case involving murdered magic users. With the victims completely drained of their magic, the San Amaro Police Department needs Parker’s special skill set to track down a killer. Navigating through San Amaro’s paranormal underbelly while dealing with his own past and this new case is the last thing Parker wants or needs.

Now Parker’s stuck trying to locate a missing girl, stop a paranormal war, find a killer, and resist Detective Nicholas King’s many charms. Here’s hoping he doesn’t die trying.

Wormwood Summer is a 107,000 word MM urban fantasy with a HFN ending.

I GOT THE BOOK ON KU.

Review:

Dear Kai Buttler,

This series was recommended to me by one of the DA commenters and I grabbed the first one (this story) almost right away, because as I may have mentioned before it has been pretty hard for me to find SFF story or mystery story with gay couple front and center that I would enjoy for the last couple of years no less. I wanted to love this book *so much* especially since this is the first entry in the seven book series.

Alas, initially I struggled and what was worse, not only I struggled, I could not figure out why I was struggling.

This is your urban fantasy and indeed we have a developing m/m love story front and center and it should have absolutely been my cup of tea.

I think part of the problem I had was “this is not a book, this is me” issue. I just have read a lot of urban fantasy by now and I need the setting to be a little bit more original than your typical mix of fae, vampires, werewolves and them all fighting for something.

Eventually this book does offer some stuff, which was if not unique, then quite original. Off the top of my head at least I do not recall the take on the alchemist magic that this book offered.

Fae Magic … I just do not know – on one hand, we have all the traditional courts and we have Fae and the facts that dealings with them are deeply rooted in obligation for the party who is involved with the Fae for some reason and the Fae themselves. This was not unique at all (to put it mildly), however the author went deeper in what magic of obligation actually means and I enjoyed that interpretation.

I also think the mystery part of the story was resolved way too quickly.

The biggest problem to me however was that the two main characters were slippery. Not slippery in a sense of them being the bad people (quite the contrary), but I think I just could not grasp who both men were at least for the first part of the book. I am not sure if it makes sense, but I could not see the characters (not how they looked, but who they were as people) in my head. It was frustrating I suppose. I guess I just did not feel that the author got a hang of her characters right away.

The second part was much better, the characters materialized finally and there was more interesting action and I do want to see what happened next between Nick and Parker, so I am absolutely going to give the second book a try.