No Rest for the Wiccan

No Rest for the Wiccan

By Madelyn Alt

3 Out of 5 Covers

Maggie O’Neill comes to the aid of her pregnant, bed-ridden sister by taking care of her two nieces and helping clean the house.  Her sister, Mel, may seem like she has the perfect life, but she admits to Maggie that there is something sinister in her house.  This haunting doesn’t go as far as anything like the Paranormal Activities movies, but it does require a cleansing by Maggie’s boss, the witch Liss, and their friend Marcus.  This leads to Mel blabbing to everyone she can that there are witches in their small, conservative town of Stony Mill.  And Maggie breaks up with her police man boyfriend, who she didn’t see a lot and always fought with, a development that has been a long time coming.  Oh, there is also a murder that happens, it’s really not that important to the story, though it does lead to one of the more exciting climaxes in the series.

The shift in focus to urban (well, suburban) fantasy is welcome, though the author does seem hesitant to fully commit to a change in genre.  The complications brought about because of Maggie’s sister’s gossip offers a new dynamic to the series, which could serve the series well as conflict is the source of drama.  And a chance to visit with Maggie’s family, introduced in the first book but never really brought up since, also provides a change of pace.

But besides breaking up with her boyfriend (a plot point I predicted would happen in the first book), many of the changes don’t have a profound impact on Maggie.  She seems to exist on the edge of all the action, leaving her to worry and fret but not much to actually do.  Maggie’s general passivity has been evident throughout the series and it makes the stories less dynamic then they should be.  And the fact that the mystery is so secondary to the plot that the author can’t even conjure up red herrings could be a disturbing sign for a mystery series.