I grabbed Casey Wyatt‘s Mystic Ink from the Amazon KDP list.
Description from Goodreads:
Welcome to Mystic, Connecticut, where a Satyr owns the local pawn shop, a Minotaur serves the tastiest pizza in town, and the nearest gate to the Underworld resides in the alley outside a tattoo parlor.
Nix–Sea Nymph, talented artist and proprietor of Mystic Ink–just wants to run her tattoo shop in peace and quiet. Peace and quiet, however, are the least of her problems. Mortal corpses keep springing up in her alley like daisies. Hades is angry that the mortals’ souls are missing. And to top it all off, the human authorities suspect Nix of foul play.
Before long, the supernatural police force takes an interest. They dispatch Agent Calder Quinne to investigate. His assignment is simple: determine Nix’s guilt or innocence by observing her daily routine. Instead, he’s faced with an uncooperative Nymph who resents his presence and evades him at every opportunity.
Nix finds Cal far too attractive and a challenge to her self-imposed ban on relationships. She wants him out of her life as soon as possible. When Cal’s soul is stolen next and Nix wakes up missing memories of the evening’s events, even she starts to wonder if she’s guilty. Now, she has only two weeks to locate Cal’s missing soul, or he’ll be doomed to spend eternity as a Shade.
Review: **Warning, slightly spoilerish**
Meh, it was alright. The writing was perfectly readable and it was well edited. I have no complaints on that front. But the story had a number of elements that I just plain dislike. For one, though Nix was the main character and the events centred around her, it wasn’t her who saved the day. Nope, Gods forbid the woman be in on the important action. Instead, she ran around from the start of the book until the end, encountering and being attacked by one mythological creature after another. Note, not intentionally doing anything but instead reacting to a presented stimulus. Then, in the end, all her male protectors went behind her back and saved the day. It was subtle, but all the impetus was taken by the men. At one point, Cal even asked her, Do you trust me?… Then hold your questions a little longer. In other words she not only wasn’t in on the action, she wasn’t even allowed to ask about it. This was all further exasperated by the fact that all of the power players were Gods. The only real Goddess you get to know is vapid and too busy with her facials and pedicures to be important.
Then there was the complete mishmash of pantheons. I get that this was intentional. The D.L. was, after all, an alliance of them. But come on, first we’re presented with the Greeks (including Sitars, Cyclops, Titans, Nymphs, Fates, Furies, Basilisk, etc), then the Egyptians. I’m still on board at this point. Then the Elves show up. Huh? And then Aliens! Really, WTF, it was just too much, too cluttered, too many disparate genres thrown together.
Then there was how easily everything wrapped up. The bad guy was defeated with absolute ease. More than once, problems were overcome almost miraculously. Nix being able to call in a favour based on winning the office raffle the year before, for example. Thats handy. Cal was given his prize and avoided a fate worse than death despite technically not completing his quest. Then, in the end, Nix rails at her father for three or four minutes and manages to convince him to change the rules that have been in effect for, presumably, millennia. I seem to recall stubbornness being a trait of the gods. Plus, these were pantheon-wide rules, so they affected everyone, not just her. It was just too easy.
Now I know I’ve bitched a lot. I was annoyed by the end of the book. But as I said, it was well written. There were some really fun characters. I especially liked Zeph and Devlin. I’m not discouraging anyone from reading it. Heck, I might even pick up the sequel if I come across it. I enjoyed the read, just not every aspect of the book.
