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A review by roxanamalinachirila
The Magician's Angel by Jordan L. Hawk
3.0
A fun, Christmas-y read, with a bit of a mystery thrown in over the romance.
Twelfth Junction is a small town - it was meant to be bigger, but then things happened and it just never grew. Hell, it never became a real junction, even, and there's only a single train line running through it, so it's basically the back end of nowhere.
The theater is slowly dying, too, and the owner calls what will probably be the last performers to ever come there. The owner's brother and the town accountant, Edward, doesn't really want to be anywhere near the theater, but there are numbers to be crunched there, and he's the only one to crunch them, so he ends up meeting Christopher, the magician, who is planning on making it big in Chicago very soon, with a once in a lifetime opportunity. There's instant attraction between them, but they both have lives to go to.
But everything goes awry when one of the performers in murdered and everyone else is kept in town until the mystery is solved, which can be a long while, considering the fact that the local police is pretty incompetent. Christopher and Edward team up to find the killer, to clear their names, ensure their freedom (in Christopher's case, so he can go to Chicago) and keep the theater going.
While there's nothing I disliked about it (there's very little to dislike in this novella, it's well written and the mystery's good), and while it's nice and comforting, somehow it failed to impress. Maybe I'll be able to pinpoint what didn't work for me with a re-read at some point (or maybe I'll realize I wasn't in the right mood for it, who knows?).
Twelfth Junction is a small town - it was meant to be bigger, but then things happened and it just never grew. Hell, it never became a real junction, even, and there's only a single train line running through it, so it's basically the back end of nowhere.
The theater is slowly dying, too, and the owner calls what will probably be the last performers to ever come there. The owner's brother and the town accountant, Edward, doesn't really want to be anywhere near the theater, but there are numbers to be crunched there, and he's the only one to crunch them, so he ends up meeting Christopher, the magician, who is planning on making it big in Chicago very soon, with a once in a lifetime opportunity. There's instant attraction between them, but they both have lives to go to.
But everything goes awry when one of the performers in murdered and everyone else is kept in town until the mystery is solved, which can be a long while, considering the fact that the local police is pretty incompetent. Christopher and Edward team up to find the killer, to clear their names, ensure their freedom (in Christopher's case, so he can go to Chicago) and keep the theater going.
While there's nothing I disliked about it (there's very little to dislike in this novella, it's well written and the mystery's good), and while it's nice and comforting, somehow it failed to impress. Maybe I'll be able to pinpoint what didn't work for me with a re-read at some point (or maybe I'll realize I wasn't in the right mood for it, who knows?).