50 Ways to Hex Your Lover: Linda Wisdom

Jasmine "Jazz" Tremaine – witch and driver for All Creatures Limo Service – is one of those people who cannot stay out of trouble. If it's not one thing, it's another: dodging her ghoulish boss, removing hexes from various unsavory and unlikeable individuals (one with a particularly nasty stench from you-know-where) and worst of all...her on-off-love-hate vampire cop lover, Nikolai Gregorivich. After a few centuries, you'd think they'd get it together by now, but no.

When Nikolai comes calling and asking for help in hunting down a serial vampire killer, she pops him with a few fireballs. But resisting his charm is nigh impossible. And so is the hunt when the clues are leading back to her past.

I tried to like this book. I really really did. With a pair of bunny slippers from hell and a ghost haunting her classic car, what could go wrong? With a host of other oddballs along the way, it should have been one seriously amusing book.

It's not. It took four (four!) attempts to finally reach the end.

Irma the chain-smoking, car-haunting ghost is annoying to an extreme. Jazz is a witch, and surely she has an exorcist in her little black book to solve that problem. The romance sputters about halfway and lacked any sort of fire between Jazz and Nikolai (fireballs not withstanding.) And don't get me started on the bunny slippers...

The overall feel I had is one of a supernatural comic strip. Packing it full of characters clutters the landscape and what could have been a fun outing ends up being lost. Perhaps my brand of humor demands more from a novel, because this one is too cutesy and trying too hard.

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Publisher: Sourcebooks, Incorporated
Pub. Date: March 2008
ISBN-13: 9781402210853