I haven't read Karen Marie Moning in many years, so when I saw she had a new release out, The House at Watch Hill, I decided to invest. I was hoping for a haunted house book, but it's a witch book that seems to be a spin off from her highlander and Fever series. Since I've read a couple of books from both, and thought the Fever series was pretty good, I figured okay, give it a try.
The premise: Zo Grey is out job hunting when she has a frightening psychic episode that later turns out to be her sharing her terminally-ill mother's gruesome death in a house fire meant to kill both of them. She then learns she has inherited a house and more in Louisiana. Since she's penniless and facing a mountain of medical debt, Zo goes to collect her inheritance, and discovers a small town rife with secrets, an elaborate network of witches and lots of mysteries, all of which revolve around her and her massive, multi-million-dollar inheritance.
Technically it was a well-written story, as to be expected from the author. It does seem to be influenced by Anne Rice's Mayfair series, and the Meredith Gentry books by Laurell K. Hamilton, but there are some original elements that prevent it from being a knock-off of either. It's not a doorstopper like many of the author's books back in her heyday; I managed to read it in about a week.
Problems: for me, many. I didn't care for the angry feminist slant and the sexist condescending manner in which all the men in the book were depicted; both seemed excessive (I like male characters and have great affection for my own, so I have a bias here.) There are a lot of parallels with the characters from this book and the Fever series, particularly the protagonist and what I assume to be her future love interest. Some authors make careers telling the same story over and over, but I'm not a fan of that. The oddness of the protagonist's given name is never explained properly or even spelled the same way consistently. The book packs a lot of world building in 365 pages, and while I appreciated most of it (and how it sets up the series) at points I became frustrated with the endless descriptions of things that really have no bearing on the story.
The main problem for me was the near constant foreshadowing and warning the reader from the protagonist/narrator. It crops up at times on every other page. That kind of thing can be from a heavy-handed editor insisting on letting the reader in on what's coming; when you do it too much the big dark moment falls flat. Which it did in this book.
If you Like Karen Marie Moning then you'll probably enjoy this novel. Although I appreciate some of the author's previous works, I really didn't care for this one.
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