50 Ways to Hex Your Lover by Linda Wisdom
Sourcebooks
Paranormal
Full Length, Hot
Review by Poppy

The sizzling love affair between Jazz and Nick has been off-again-on-again-for about 300 years. Mostly off, lately. But now Nick needs Jazz’s help, and while Jazz and Nick try to figure out their own hearts and resist their ever-increasing attraction, they must steer clear of a maniacal killer with super-supernatural powers. They are surrounded by a hilarious cast of oddball paranormal characters, including Norma, the chain-smoking ghost who haunts Jazz’s sports car, Dweezil, her ghoul of a boss, and Fluff and Puff, a pair of bunny slippers with sharp teeth and short tempers (watch your ankles!).

♥ ♥ ♥

Looking for some hot fun with a touch of romance?  Then this is the book for you!

Jazz, a 700 year old witch who is in exile on Earth (of a sort -- an imagined earth where paranormal beings share an uneasy co-existence with humans) and who has an on again/off again sexual relationship with vampire, Nick Gregory.  Witches and vampires do NOT like each other at all, so their relationship is a big anomaly for them, especially since -- during sex, Nick is desperate to bite, but can't because witch blood can kill him.

It's been 70 years or so since their last encounter, and Jazz isn't feeling too friendly toward Nick.  So when he looks her up, she expresses her feelings with a few scorching fireballs (which get her in trouble with the witch council, and add to the days of her exile).  Still, he's insistent because vampires are disappearing and Nick thinks it has to do with a man Jazz thought she'd killed seven decades earlier.

The author has scads of interesting secondary characters, including Fluff and Puff -- the man-(and pretty much anything else) eating bunny slippers; Irma -- the ghost trapped in Jazz's vintage car; Krebs -- the human roommate who build web pages for vampire dating services; Dweezil -- her creature boss, and many, many more.

And, if the story is a bit slow to start, and if Ms. Wisdom takes a while to really get rolling on the plot that should be driving the story (either the mystery or the romance, take your pick), the clever interaction between characters was enough to keep me reading.  The heat between Nick and Jazz was very well written as well, and you can feel Jazz's indecision, frustration and understandable hesitation to start up with Nick again, given how badly their times together have always ended.

The love scenes are hot, hot, hot and utterly believable; and fairly calm, mostly centered Nick is a perfect foil to emotional Jazz, who frequently annoys Mother Nature by allowing her temper to flare and cause thunder rumbles where they have no business rumbling.  I truly don't understand why Jazz keeps Fluff and Puff, since they seem to serve absolutely no purpose other than strange comic relief and general annoyance of the other characters (especially Krebs), but maybe that will either change or be explained.  I'm madly in love with Krebs -- and I hope he gets his own story someday.

Truthfully, this was a tough book to review.  So many characters are involved, so much is happening that it's hard to describe exactly why I liked this book as much as I did.  But, fact is, all-in-all "50 Ways to Hex your Lover" was a thoroughly enjoyable read.