Stray Magic

A Strays Novel

By: Kelly Meding

Narrated by: Cynthia Farrell

Shiloh Harrison was hoping for a few days off to recover from a particularly nasty assignment, preferably with the help of the talented hands (and, well, the rest of his body, too) of her sexy boyfriend Vincent. But when a group of vampires takes an entire trailer park hostage, there’s nothing to do but make her apologies and get to the scene.

Such is the life of a Federal Marshal in the Paranormal Investigators Unit.

Yet this isn’t like her typical track-and-nab case. Something is going on that has vampires scared, and it takes all her strength not to imagine what could frighten such powerful creatures. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have that option. Her boss is MIA; someone is snatching vampires; and there’s a ticking clock that can only end one way: a bloodbath.

Unless she can stop it.

The first book in a new series, Stray Magic is a dark and sexy mystery, with enough twists and curves to keep you on the edge of your seat until the very end.

Public Domain (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers

It was ok

It kept my interest well enough. I wasn’t really pulled deep into the story, but I am curious about what happens next. If the next book becomes available I would get it. The narrator did a great job. The story was light and there were no sex scenes to to make you cringe.

Intriguing from beginning to end

This selection kept my attention from word one and kept me guessing until the very end. Looking forward to the sequel.

A little clunky, but I’d get the sequel

This was a decent urban fantasy, paranormal police procedural story. I think series such as Harmony Black did a better job with the niche genre, but I liked some of the twists, like featuring Shiloh as a half-genie working on a Paranormal Investigation team with a stag-shifter, fallen incubus and damphir. Necromancy and spiders also feature prominently, which gave this a little more delicious dark to add to the gritty police detective vibe. Ms. Farrel’s narration provides a great range of accents and is perfect for Shiloh’s tough persona.

A few downsides:
-There’s oddly 3 F bombs in the first five minutes, and then nothing until the end of the book, when a few more get thrown down. It was a clumsy attempt at conveying toughness that might have worked if consistent with the character’s dialogue throughout.
-There’s a lot of telling instead of showing. For example, we’re told agent Novak used his incubus magic to interrogate a suspect, but I’d have loved to have been in the room for that.
-There’s rather shallow development of character descriptions and personalities, and only enough world building and magic explanation as needed to advance the plot. For example, early on, one of Shiloh’s friends is taken. She supposedly cares a lot for said friend, but she thinks of that friend only once in the hours of listening before there’s a single two minute scene where we learn of the friend’s fate.
-The romance aspects don’t feel romantic at all. The sex is indirectly referenced and doesn’t contribute much to the “sexy” story promised in the summary.
-While the mystery unfolds, we only see the bad handiwork of villains. The villains themselves remain silent and unidentified until the very end, when they appear and are dealt with in quick confrontations. It was rather anticlimactic.