Strange Magic: An Essex Witch Museum Mystery (Essex Witch Museum Mystery, #1)

by Syd Moore

Rosie Strange doesn't believe in ghosts or witches or magic. No, not at all. It’s no surprise therefore when she inherits the ramshackle Essex Witch Museum, her first thought is to take the money and run.

Still, the museum exerts a curious pull over Rosie. There’s the eccentric academic who bustles in to demand she help in a hunt for old bones, those of the notorious Ursula Cadence, a witch long since put to death. And there’s curator Sam Stone, a man about whom Rosie can’t decide if he’s tiresomely annoying or extremely captivating. It all adds up to looking like her plans to sell the museum might need to be delayed, just for a while.

Finding herself and Sam embroiled in a most peculiar centuries-old mystery, Rosie is quickly expelled from her comfort zone, where to her horror, the secrets of the past come with their own real, and all too present, danger as a strange magic threatens to envelope them all.

• ISBN10: 1786070987
• ISBN13: 9781786070982
• Publish Date: 4 May 2017
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Point Blank
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 400
• Language: English

Reviews

[MurderByDeath]

Both the titles and the covers of these books grabbed me, and as they were part of a 40% off sale, and I've been looking for new mystery series, I couldn't resist grabbing #'s 1 and 2.   I'm glad I did, although book 1 and I got off to a rocky start, when cracking it open the other night in bed, I read the prologue, featuring a comatose little boy suddenly 'waking up' speaking in Early English and rising up out of bed, floating in the crucifix position.  NOT what I want to read about right before turning out the lights and going to bed, thanks.   Fortunately, none of the rest of the book is nearly as scary as the prologue.  Spooky fun, yes, a tad creepy at times, but mostly fun.  Rosie has inherited her estranged grandfather's Essex Witch Museum, which she plans on selling as soon as possible.  Except while she's there a plea for help comes along that she can't refuse, and she and the curator, Sam (cue romantic tension) find themselves on a race to locate the remains of the original Essex Witch.   It's a good story - an excellent story.  My only beefs with it were the slightly forced tone of the will-they-won't-they romantic tension, and Rosie's character, to a certain degree.  The former is just personal taste, but the latter is, I think, a lack of micro-cultural understanding. Rosie is a strong, very intelligent and independent woman, but has a chip on her shoulder about being an Essex girl - and I don't know what that means.  As the book progressed I got the feeling it's sort of like an American redneck, but my lack of confidence meant Rosie came across paranoid, or at least carrying an aggressive inferiority complex.     Possibly related, her internal dialogue's habit of noting every time a man looked at her breasts/body got super tedious, super fast.  Yes, men look at women's bits; sometimes they are so distracted by them they lose sight of the fact women have faces.  Yes, it's tiresome, Yes, it's deplorable. Don't care. Don't want to hear about it in my murder mystery, it's beyond irrelevant and lent a rather shallow tone to an MC that wasn't.   Note though that these were minor annoyances; if I understood the Essex thing better, I'm guessing they would have lent authenticity to her character, and her accounting of leers received didn't happen more than 2 or 3 times, and it's a personal tic.  The majority of the story was, as I said, excellent: fast-paced, well plotted, and my favorite literary device: based on the history of a real woman tried and hung for witchcraft, Ursula Kemp.  In the acknowledgements, the author outlines at what point the fiction diverges from the reality, and both make for compelling storytelling. Also, people throughout history have been appalling.  Truly appalling.    I'm so glad I already have book 2 in hand, and I believe book 3 is scheduled for publication any day now, which means if I like Strange Sight as much as I enjoyed Strange Magic, I'll only have to wait as long as the postal service to find out what happens next.

[wyvernfriend]

has potential I'm not sure where the author was going with the story, I found the humour a bit laboured and it felt a bit forced to me but there were moments that kept me reading.
 
Rosie Strange has inherited the Essex Witch Museum and her family assume she's going to sell it. She decides to go there and get it ready for sale and then gets caught up with a child possessed by a ghost who is slowly killing him. To save the child she has to work with the handsome Sam Stone, the curator of the museum to find the bones of a witch.
 
Rosie is a burnt out cynical Benefit Fraud investigator who has met all the bad in society and has all the attitude of someone who has to do this too much. There are several infodumps and "as-you-know Bob" moments, which seem to be mostly there to educate the main character and to show how much research the author has done. 
 
There is potential here and hopefully things will improve with more. There were times when I felt like things were moving quite slowly and then it felt like I had missed some moment. This is basically a road trip through the English Countryside but it also felt only like the author was forcing the characters to spend time together.
 
Falls into Urban fantasy, amateur sleuth, supernatural, ghost, witches, possibly chilling children, terror in a small town and terrifying women but I'm using it for plain horror, possession that could kill you is pretty horrific.

[Eve1972]

I read this AGES ago and totally forgot to write a review. All I remember is that I liked it. *lol*