Dime Store Magic by Kelley Armstrong

  Dime Store Magic is the third entry in Kelley Armstrong's Women of the Otherworld series.  The first two books in the series (Bitten and Stolen) centered around werewolves.  In this book witches take center stage.  I have to admit, I missed the werewolves a little.

In Stolen representatives of the various supernatural races - werewolves, witches, sorcerers, shamans - are rounded up and held captive by a psychopath who likes hunting people as if they were in a live version of a video game and scientists who like to do experiments on unwilling victims.  Paige's mother is one of those who are captured.  In the mysterious compound where the supernaturals are kept she finds Savannah, a young witch whose mother has been killed and whose father is unknown.  When Paige's mother doesn't make it out of the compound alive, twenty-three-year-old Paige is left to care for Savannah.  Along with her new found parental responsibilities, Paige is now the leader of her coven, a coven that for the most part thinks she is far too young to be leader of anything.  Juggling her new responsibilities are hard enough when Paige encounters an even bigger problem - a custody challenge over Savannah.

Dime Store Magic was slow to start.  I didn't mind the slow build but did grow tired of Paige and Savannah's impetuousness.  I couldn't expect to much from Savannah given that she was only thirteen, but Paige's gullibility and foolishness started to drive me crazy after awhile.  Seriously, Paige fell for every trick in the book, like when she goes to a funeral home to pick up her file from her former lawyer Grantham's firm.  Grantham died under strange circumstances with Paige and Savannah as the only witnesses.  When a lawyer from Grantham's firm ask Paige to come pick her file, she agrees to meet at the funeral home where Grantham's body is because meeting at the law firm would be inappropriate but somehow meeting at the funeral home is perfectly okay so long as she enters through the backdoor.  Of course, it is a trap.

Eventually Paige does smarten up.  Her cause is helped by the appearance of Lucas Cortez, a member of the infamous Cortez cabal (witches have covens and sorcerers have cabals).  Once Lucas arrives the story begins to pickup.  There's action, romance, betrayals, and new beginnings.  As with the werewolf pact, there are all kinds of rules, politics, and history surrounding witches and sorcerers.  Much of that is revealed here.  On a side note, it is interesting that witches are always women and that they always bear daughters, while sorcerers are men who always father sons.

I enjoyed Dime Store Magic, though slightly less than the first two books in the series.  I'm looking forward to the next book, however.  The ending of Dime Store Magic was really good and set the stage upon which the next book will hopefully build.