✱✱Audio Book Review✱✱ Blood & Ash by Deborah Wilde

Cold-blooded kidnappers. Long-lost magic. When things get serious, she goes full Sherlock.

Ashira Cohen takes pride in being the only female private investigator in Vancouver. With her skills, her missing persons case should be a piece of cake.

She wasn't counting on getting bashed in the skull, revealing a hidden tattoo and supernatural powers she shouldn't possess.

Or the bitter icing on top: a spree of abductions and terrifying ghostly creatures on a deadly bender.

And don't even get her started on the golems.

Reluctantly partnered with her long-time nemesis Levi, the infuriating leader of the magic community, Ash resolves to keep her focus on the clue trail and off their sexual tension because WTF is up with that?

But with a mastermind organization pulling strings from the shadows and Levi's arrogance driving her to pick out his body bag, can Ash rescue the captives and uncover the truth or will the next blood spilled be her own?

Blood & Ash is the epic first novel in The Jezebel Files. If you like headstrong heroines, complex mysteries, and a dash of red-hot romance, you'll love Deborah Wilde's laugh out loud tale.

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Momma Says: 2 stars⭐⭐

I really wanted to like this book. The blurb had all the right stuff, so it certainly had potential, but it completely missed the mark with me. The narrator, Hollie Jackson, does well, and she captures the tone for sarcasm and wit very well. However, she could only do so much with this story.

This book is self-proclaimed as 'A Snarky Urban Fantasy Detective Series.' It says so right there alongside the title. And okay, there is magic, which speaks to Urban Fantasy even though world-building fell way short in my opinion. Ash is a detective, so that holds true as well. And then we have the snark. Yeah, it's there in spades. This book has more snark than you can shake a stick at, which is where my biggest problem came in.

I don't know, maybe it's just me and I don't have the right sense of humor, but I didn't find anything about this book even remotely funny. There is a difference in witty snark and sarcasm and crude one-liners mixed with juvenile sexual references. I'm not offended by the crudity, and I have no problem with steamy scenes, but when they come across as the equivalence of teenagers gossiping and giggling about sex, it's not amusing and it's certainly not sexy. At one point in the story, there's a line: 'this is just sex...' Yeah, that's about the way I felt after the umpteenth crude line. It's just crudity instead of comedy. I truly do like snark and sarcasm, and I use both quite often. I just don't like this brand of snark, and while I caught myself rolling my eyes so much I feared my mother might be right about the whole sticking that way if I kept it up, I didn't even so much as chuckle while listening to this one. 

Then we have the characters. Try as I might, I couldn't find anything about Ash that I liked. Actually, I didn't much care for any of these characters. They either came across as completely bubble-headed, inept, or at the risk of becoming as repetitive as this story, crude and childish.

What it boils down to is I couldn't find anything to care about with this book. Not the characters,. not the case, not the romance. As I mentioned, the story had potential, and I do love a good sarcastic detective series. Sadly, this doesn't fall into that category for me, and I have no desire to go any further with this series.

✽✽Review copy provided by NetGalley and Te Da Media

 

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