Hormones, Hexes, & Exes

[cornerofmadness]

Hormones, Hexes, & Exes by J.C. Blake

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I found this one thanks to the Popsugar challenge this year and I was excited to read it. Unfortunately, I came away feeling as if the author knew how to write a cozy mystery but was less sure how to handle the paranormal witchy side of things and that bothered me the entire book. The magical worldbuilding left a lot to be desired.

Liv is having her 50th birthday party (with a lot of internalized ageism and fatphobia) and finds out her husband is having an affair with the sexy next door neighbor Selma Maybrook. This also activates her witchy powers. And this is where it almost immediately goes off the rails for me.

As it turns out the four aunts who raised her are all witches and I guess your powers activate once your ovaries deactivate. The blurb says if you believe women grow more powerful with age then this is for you. I'm fine with it but this is news to Liv and I'm like wait you let her go her entire life and never mention this heritage? What? I would feel so betrayed (Liv doesn't) So they bundle her off with them to tell her all about her heritage and to give her space from her philandering husband.

Naturally Selma ends up dead and Liv is the only suspect because the detective seems bad at his job. He was also her high school sweetheart but her aunts are up in arms because his family is cursed and we get an explanation of the witch world including an immortal (?) witch hunter general still out to kill witches (who are also immortal I guess or at least very long lived)

But none of this matters because once Liv decides she has to be the one to clear her name (and in this case I was willing to bend my rule about amateur sleuths needing to work with the detectives vs opposed to them because a cursed detective is an interesting idea) things go further off the rails. The detective and her aunts all but disappear from the story. We see/hear of them a couple times but not again until the end. All the aunts are worried about is if Liv isn't back for the solstice celebration she can never fully come into her powers or into the coven (no real explanation given)

With that in mind, Liv has a time limit on her investigation. You'd think the aunts would help in some manner being witches and all. Nope. I'm like if this solstice celebration is so important why aren't you helping her especially as she can't control her current powers? The only one to step up is her familiar which I won't spoil but it was eye rolling that anyone could miss one important detail about him.

Now the cozy mystery part of it worked well enough and knowing that the witch hunter general is back, it's not hard to guess he has a part in this. I just wish that both the detective (who you know will be the love interest down the road) and the aunts didn't fall out of the plot for much of it. There are several books in this series but I'm on the fence about reading further. It was a good beach read (and I literally read it at the beach) but is also one I'd rather find at the library than buy.



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