This took me very much by surprise. Early on in the book, someone references Harry Potter to Alex Black, first-person heroine of this story, and she corrects them: "More Harry Dresden than Harry Potter." And she's absolutely right. If this had not been so enjoyable, it might have been a bit too close to the Dresden Files in theme and tone for comfort (set in Vancouver instead of Chicago). Alex doesn't have Harry's firepower as a wizard, but like Harry she has to make her living, and like him she is good at what she does.

And like in the Dresden Files, nobody's safe. Death comes unexpectedly and early, and Alex herself (like Harry) takes a beating.

Her sidekick, however, is about as far from Lt. Karrin Murphy as it is possible to be.

So, yes, it is very, very reminiscent of Jim Butcher's series. But, fortunately, the writing carries it off. In fact, the only reason I gave this four stars instead of five was a smidgen of disappointment in the climax; the buildup was excellent, but I thought it fizzled a bit.

All in all, though, I had a great time with this – and I just bought the second book. (They're now being published under the pseudonym Alexis Blakely.) Looking forward to it!

The usual disclaimer: I received this book via Netgalley for review.

I tried over and over and over to read this book. I started it, put it down and read something else, then went back to this book and couldn't get more than a few pages in before I ended up putting it down again. That cycle happened at least three times before I just couldn't force myself to pick this book up yet again. I kept going back to this book because I couldn't honestly think of any reason why I shouldn't like it. There was a strong main character with interesting powers, a brewing mystery, and the start of good world building, yet none of that was at all able to keep my interest. Needless to say, I didn't finish this story.

I find myself completely unable to read even halfway through the book.

It's practically a clone of Jim Butcher's Dresden series, but with a female protagonist. Even the writing style is similar. I find this sort of thing extremely distasteful, and this might be the worst job of "filing off the serial numbers I've ever seen.

Dont bother with this. Buy Jim Butcher's books, this is his jam.

First time reading this author, and I would like to see more. Could have used some more polish, but the worldbuilding is solid, and I'll be watching this series go forward I hope!

I did not like this book. The world building was nonexistent and from the beginning I had a difficult time grasping the character. Alex is an orphan/foster kid who used drugs to escape her troubles growing up alone and with magic she could not control. We don't really know anything about magic and neither does she, but she appears to perform increasingly complex spells easily and has some unknown power inside her that she has used once to bake someone to a crisp. No biggie and not mentioned again. You get the feeling that everyone in the supe world knows she is something special except her. She is clueless and the reader is also. Then she has this slacker friend Chase who is also not who he seems--he's a thief with convenient knowledge of security systems, a computer genius and owns a gun. He is a seemingly overweight bad-ass. This made the book difficult to finish and impossible to like. I know there are other books after this and hope there was better world building, but i am not interested in reading any further installments.

This is one of those rare occurrences where I both bought (a free copy from Amazon) and requested the same book from Netgalley (in exchange for my honest review) because the book sounded so good, yet I forgot I already had it from one of the sources.

One thing I hate: I had A LOT of questions about Alex that weren't answered, we get very, very little back story. I find out at the end of the book that there's a prequel which may provide those details. Not fair. Not only do we think we're reading the first book, but the prequel isn't even listed at Amazon at this time. You can only get it if you sign up for the author's mailing list. Yay, it's free, but it's too late. What back story we do get is at 44%.

Alex is apparently a mostly self trained mage who works little jobs magically unlocking things. She is
called in to find a murderer. This leap from a two bit "locksmith" to a PI/murderer chaser is a crazy leap and isn't logical. I found the story sluggish and rather uninteresting until the 70% mark.

We are introduced to a lot of characters, but like Alex, we get minimal details. I liked the character of Chase, but again there's a crazy leap of character, he is a couch potato gamer (with an interesting income source) who becomes a rabid hero type in the blink of an eye. I also couldn't see why Alex wasn't able to better explain her abilities to Chase so he knew her limitations to help their working as a team. Something important is revealed subtly about Mark but is never followed up on. Very frustrating.

I'd give this 1 out of 5 stars because I really had to push myself to finish it.