I picked up a used copy of Tate Hallaway’s Tall, Dark & Dead at Savers some time back.
The line between magic and sanity is very thin.
That’s part of why I, Garnet Lacey, quit cold turkey.
Never touch the stuff. No exceptions.
But magic is so addictive…and my inner Goddess Lilith is hard to resist. Besides, restraint isn’t easy when you manage Wisconsin’s premiere occult bookstore, and get customers like Sebastian Von Traum—piercing brown eyes, a sexy accent, and a killer body in denim and black leather. The only thing missing is an aura. Which means he’s dead… And that means trouble. I guess I’m a sucker for it. The Vatican witch hunters are on to us. My long-lost vampire ex has crawled out of the woodwork looking for action. And Sebastian’s frustrated ex is stirring in her grave. So what’s a girl to do if she’s hot for a dead man walking? Run like hell—and take full advantage of the nights…
I was mostly just confused by this book. I think it was aiming for paranormal romance, but I finished it not at all convinced of the romance. I wasn’t even sure it was a happy-for-now, beyond ‘yay, we survived together.’ But it didn’t feel like urban fantasy or even magical realism, either. In the end, I came to the last page with a bewildered shrug. That’s a thing I’ve read now.
I liked Garnet well enough. But no one else particularly stood out to me, not even the theoretical male romantic lead(s). I appreciate that Hallaway eschewed some of the genre’s usual tropes, whichever genre she was aiming for. (Or maybe, being that the book is a bit older, when it was written, the genre tropes were not yet as cemented as they are now.) But I also think that doing it less than successfully is part of my confusion about how to feel about the book.
All in all, I don’t think I’ll continue the series.
Other Reviews:
Worse, this is very much lining up to be a `Cassidy and her crew of spunky investigators’ sort of series, and as much as I liked them all well enough (especially Chuck, who you meet toward the end), Sorren—arguably the most interesting character—is perpetually underutilized. He shows up to dispense wisdom and weapons and then fades away again (even when present).
