My first impression was that was a lite book, and not to be taken too
seriously. It was vaguely interesting, especially in Star's budding
powers. I'm not really into witches and vampires, but it was fun anyway,
as they went from one unplanned interview to the next. The investigation
was straightforward, but the biggest problem was that they solved the
crime about halfway through. I kept waiting for the big twist, that they
were wrong, but it never came -just a confession that confirmed what
they already suspected, without any real deductive reasoning.
Spoiler review:
I liked the self-depreciating nature of the main character, Star, but
she didn’t impress me as an investigator. After landing a job at a
funeral parlor, she discovers that the first body she finds is a golem, and
it’s been murdered. I guess the special nature of the golem, that it
would never be embalmed or buried in the ground, has significance for
those who like the paranormal. I’m not one of those people, and picked
up the book to get a sense of fantasy murder. Unfortunately, there’s not
much of an investigation.
I liked Ben, the funeral director, in
constant threat of being mind-wiped. He’s a normal human without an
ounce of malice in him, something that Star sees through her witch
sight. He has a lot of good ideas, and his naiveté is the best way to
ease us into the world in which Star and the other witches live.
Alex, though, is the true investigator. He’s a wizard, and Star’s
ex-boyfriend, and he’s been dealing with golems and other paranormals
for hundreds of years. The golem looks like a man, and their plan is to
burn the golem, as the only way to make sure he’s dead, and create a new
body for the ceremony, which has already been planned, and in
anticipation of drawing out the murderer. I’m not sure why they want to
make sure he’s all the way dead, except that he might be out for
revenge, I guess. He seemed to have lived many years as a nondescript
member of society, so why not try to revive him if possible?
Of
course, he had a wife, a mistress and a girlfriend, who all now become
suspects. They interview the wife first, traipsing around almost at
midnight, but I guess that doesn’t bother the witching community. Her
personal assistant is a vampire, and right away they find a motive for
him. Richard apparently shared the affections of the wife, who probably
viewed him more like a pet than anything else. But she desperately
wanted a child with the golem, so that rules her out as a murder
suspect. The mistress seems distressed, but offers little of value
except to confirm the wife’s story. And they don’t even get to the
girlfriend until the next morning, after they’ve convinced themselves
that the wife’s personal assistant, Richard, is the murderer.
They plan to lure him to the funeral and a confession with the
girlfriend, but never get that far, because Richard shows up in an
attempt to destroy the body (because there’s other unknown evidence that
leads to him? We never find out…). There is a shootout, in which Star
defends herself and Ben, and Alex shows up. Between the two of them,
they manage to disable Richard. Later, they convince the magical
ministry to let Ben keep his memory, and create a new post for normal
humans for association with witches.
There were several typos and
missing words, which was distracting to the story, and several jarring
chapter or scene changes, where I thought I’d missed something. The
story was fun in what it delivered, which was sarcasm from Star, as well
as a sense of being tied to Alex even though they were no longer an
item. But the investigation was stale, and barely offered any kind of
investigative prowess. They had the murder solved halfway through the
book, and were so convinced that all they wanted to do was lure Richard
out. No twist, no revelation. Richard simply wanted to be intimate with
the wife, and prevent the chance of them having a child. There was no
real drama, no mystery. The characters were well drawn, but the story
itself lacked substance.
-- First reading (ebook)