Mercy’s Magic
by P.J. Day & Elizabeth Basque
Pangolin Press
Mercedes Cruz is a single mother and a private investigator. She’s also something else, something very, very powerful. Something she has denied for a long time. Mercy is a bruja… Spanish for “witch.”
In Mercy’s Magic, Mercedes agrees to help her ex-husband find a missing person, an employee who hasn’t reported to work in many days. As she looks deeper into the case, and as her own powers increase, Mercy will come across the seedier side of southern California, a side that takes advantage of the poor and desperate.
Mercy soon learns that not all is as it seems and that a very dark force is watching her every move, a dark force that will do anything to stop her. Now in the fight of her life, Mercy is about to discover just how powerful a witch she really can be…
I can not recommend this book. It needs some more editing and I’d say a bit more to the story.
The idea behind the story itself is mostly fine. We follow a witch who has apparently not paid attention growing up to her powers. She works as a private investigator, and is taking on a case to find her missing neighbor. She finds the missing neighbor but runs into some trouble since her neighbor is one of a few being held by a daemon.
Then it gets weird. In the course of battle she takes a love potion, exactly as she plans, with the intention of taking an antidote to the potion, but – spoiler – dumps the antidote down the toilet. So she ends up falling in love with the daemon and he with her.
The ending felt unrealistic. I unfortunately can’t really explain without giving away what happens, but I’m still trying to piece together how what happened fits with the characters, or even the reality the story takes place in. The ending comes at you like a hockey player, in their hockey gear, playing baseball. It just doesn’t make sense.
Then there is a gaping hole, to my mind, from a tiny detail. The tiny detail is Mercy’s daughter takes a crystal from Mercy’s friend’s store since she had the feeling she would need it. This crystal does not appear again in the story. Not even a mention that the crystal inventory is now light a crystal. The story then fastforwards six months, and still, nothing has happened with this crystal.
If this hadn’t been on my TBR for the Book Junkie Trials readathon, I would have DNF’d the book. Which is a sad statement since the book is only 154 pages.
