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Author: Virginia Boecker

Series: Witch Hunter (book 1)

Rating: 3 stars

Genre: Fantasy

Synopsis: Witches, watch out… Half Bad meets Kill Bill in this incredible new supernatural series.

Sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Grey doesn’t look dangerous. A tiny, blonde, wisp of a girl shouldn’t know how to poison a wizard and make it look like an accident. Or take out ten necromancers with a single sword and a bag of salt. Or kill a man using only her thumb. But things are not always as they appear. Elizabeth is one of the best witch hunters in Anglia and a member of the king’s elite guard, devoted to rooting out witchcraft and bringing those who practice it to justice. And in Anglia, the price of justice is high: death by burning.

When Elizabeth is accused of being a witch herself, she’s arrested and thrown in prison. The king declares her a traitor and her life is all but forfeit. With just hours before she’s to die at the stake, Elizabeth gets a visitor – Nicholas Perevil, the most powerful wizard in Anglia. He offers her a deal: he will free her from prison and save her from execution if she will track down the wizard who laid a deadly curse on him.

As Elizabeth uncovers the horrifying facts about Nicholas’s curse and the unwitting role she played in its creation, she is forced to redefine the differences between right and wrong, friends and enemies, love and hate… and life and death.

The first book in an incredible new series set in a fantastical medieval world.

How I got this book: Netgalley

Release Date: June 2, 2015

The Short Version:

Urgh. I have no idea what I think of this. The story itself was good, but the characters…

The Long Version:

First things first: Ignore the synopsis. It lies.

Now that we’ve cleared that up…

I’m going to start by saying that the story itself was good! I actually really wanted to know what happened, and that is probably the main thing that kept me reading.

The idea of the hunters was also really interesting. The whole ‘special group of people designated to hunt down witches’ definitely held my attention. Even if the whole thing did feel a bit like Merlin:

What with the whole “All magic is evil” mantra thing going on.

My main issue was with the characters. At times, the majority of them seemed really stupid. The main character, Elizabeth, gets thrown in jail for having herbs in her pockets. When a wizard breaks her out and has his friends take care of her and make sure she doesn’t die, what’s the first thing she thinks?

LeprachaunBURN

She doesn’t even stop to consider the fact that they saved her life…she just immediately starts planning a way to turn them in.

Because they’re magic, and therefore they must be evil, right?

Now, on one level I get that she’s been raised to believe magic is evil, and that she’s not going to just get over that. But still.

Eventually Elizabeth gets over the whole “I’m going to arrest these really nice people who saved my life”, and while the story itself was enjoyable, I just found that I wasn’t connecting with the characters. At all.

They annoyed me, they irritated me, and in the end, I just didn’t like them enough to particularly care about what happened to them.

Though I do have to say, this book does get points for the ‘final battle’ scene. I did find myself enjoying those final chapters more than I had enjoyed the rest of the book.

In Conclusion:

An enjoyable enough story that basically just didn’t work for me, namely because of the characters.