Red-Haired Ash Reads

As someone who loves urban fantasy I was excited to jump into this new series, sadly while this book did have some good things, there were quite a few issues that keep me from loving this book. 

Charley is owner and sometimes bartender of the White Stag, a paranormal friendly bar in the town of Crimson. While I liked Charley sometimes, I mostly found her actions frustrating. To start with she is the daughter of a witch and a human but spends almost the whole book denying that she has any magic even though she is constantly using magic. As you can imagine this quickly got old. I don’t mind a main character denying their magic because they are afraid or in hiding, but to just constantly deny it because your mother told you you don’t have magic is very dumb and annoying. My other issue with Charley was that she says she is concerned about her best friend and the missing town people but her actions don’t really show that. I feel like a lot of the time once she walked away from her best friend he was forgotten about until someone reminded her that he was still in trouble. Her actions were just always at odds with her words.

My other issue with this book was the pacing. This started slow and continued to have slow sections throughout the book that featured mundane scenes, like just normal days at the bar. All the action doesn’t really happen until the end, even though it was obvious from the very beginning who the villain was.  Charley and everyone else ignore all the signs that are pointing to the villain, even when the people are clearly last seen with that person before they cause problems. 

While I think this book has a good concept, I think I would have liked to see more of an investigation from the beginning for the actual villain and more of a separate resolution around the co-op instead of just it being concluded from the ending fight. It felt like the co-op ended up being an afterthought even though it was the main focus for most of the story. 

TW: Death, violence, racism (against vampires), vandalism, and hate crimes; death of a parent in car accident mentioned; animal deaths briefly mentioned; 

*ARC provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.*

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