Butter Witch

I began this book to read something like The Dresden Files as I eagerly waited for Jim Butcher to release the next installment of Harry Dresden. This was a series I was able to pick up in a box set, and I figured it would be a nice change of pace, having a mystery occur in a small town, rather than an end-of-the-world style event I am used to from Butcher. Also, it was written by a woman about an adult female character, which does (for better or worse) take me outside my comfort zone.

This is the story of a woman called Harlow Torrent. She moves back to her small seaside town of Harlot Bay, hoping to cover the Butter festival in her struggling online newspaper. When she goes to interview one of the contestants, she finds him frozen to death, with congealed blood all around him. Oh, and to complicate matters, she is a witch, and she senses that there is more than just a knife used to kill him. Someone used magic on the body, and she has to figure out why.

The strongest element of this book, by far, is Harlow’s family. She lives in a large dilapidated mansion with her mother, several aunts, and cousins. As you can imagine, this enables the reader to see all of the hijinks of a dysfunctional family. For example, all the Aunts and Harlow’s mother are divorced, and their daughters have not married yet, leading to some funny situations where the moms work to set up dates with their respective daughters so they can have grandchildren (after they marry, of course).

They also have different abilities when it comes to magic. Harlow’s ability changes by the day, literally, because she is a Slip witch. One day she can make the garden grow to fantastic proportions with the help of a Growth Spell. The next day, she can only work to heal living things with a healing spell, and so on. Add to that how she can see and communicate with ghosts, and Harlow is a woman who never seems to have a dull moment.

However, this is also one of the negatives of the book. If you are someone who is looking for a series with a defined magic system, with lots of strict rules to follow, then this is not the series for you. Many times the author seemed to be making it up as she went along. (I know that can be the basis of all magic systems for any book, but it especially felt that way here.) This also leads me to question Harlow’s Slip Witch-ness. I fear that this could be used for plot convenience in later installments.

Also, this book seems to be heavy on the family shenanigans, with the murder mystery often taking a back seat. This isn’t a bad thing, as I liked the family dynamic well enough, and these characters have room to grow in later books, but I felt like if you were expecting something along the lines of The Dresden Files, but with a female protagonist, then you would be sorely disappointed.

So, this is a good first installment that is just different enough from The Dresden Files that I think I am going to enjoy the next book. I look forward to traveling to Harlot Bay in the future and seeing what crazy schemes and ideas Harlow’s family is up to next. I give it a three out of five.

Disclaimer: I have seen other reviews comment that Lake may have plagiarized this series with a series of books called The Wicked Witches of the Midwest series by Amanda M. Lee, which contains similar ideas and characters. I cannot comment on this, since I have not read those books.