Witch 13 - Patrick Delaney
eARC provided by Oblivion Publishing and NetGalley Reading this was… an experience, to be sure. Right before Christmas, small-town sheriff Sterling Marsh finds herself facing one last night on the job before she resigns. She hopes for a quiet night, but what starts with a confrontation with a disgruntled wife of a coworker (who Sterling slept with) quickly spirals into wicked madness, and a story full of lies and gore and cartoonish witches. Yes you heard that right. The main villain of the story is a witch dressed in all black with a tall, pointy hat on her head. Now, the premise sounded very interesting to me. The gimmicky villain sounded interesting, and the cover looked appropriately creepy. I was hoping they would turn the witch gimmick into something truly terrifying, and to be fair, they did. My favourite parts of the story involved the witch getting down to her horrifying business of trying to destroy everything and everyone around her, and the prologue truly had my skin crawling. But oh. My. God. I could not force myself to care about any of the characters. Sterling was made up to be this super badass queer woman of colour, but as soon as we meet her we find out she had an affair with her married coworker (who is her subordinate), and she spends the rest of the book pining for him. It is briefly mentioned that she had a girlfriend in the past, but I felt like the LGBTQ+ tag that this book has was a bit misleading. Of course her being queer didn’t need to be a central part of the story, but I was hoping for a bit more than her pining for her married coworker. I also felt the story dragged on for quite a lot longer than it necessarily needed to. It could have benefitted from being a novella, or at least a hundred pages shorter. And honestly, I was close to throwing my kindle out the window for the first 85% of the book. I decided to push through however, and I was actually quite surprised by the twist in the end, even though it felt quite sudden. Now, would I recommend this book? No, probably not. Like I said, I felt the characters were unlikeable without the author necessarily wanting them to be (we won’t talk about Chase), and I felt the story was very dull for most of the book. The writing style also wasn’t for me, there were a lot of adjectives and a lot of weird descriptions, such as blood thumping like a geyser. I can confirm that geysers do not thump. Anyway, big thanks to Orion Publishing and NetGalley for providing me with this eArc in exchange for my honest review.
