How To Help A Hungry Werewolf, Put this book on your Spooky Season TBR

 

This book has a fabulous cover! Don't you love it? Is this a Paranormal Romance? Is this a RomCom? Does it matter? Let me tell you, I have thoughts about certain parts of the book that I need to discuss in a book club setting! 

Since the tagline of the book is (to paraphrase) What We Do in the Shadows meets Gilmore Girls, I'm categorizing this book as a Paranormal RomCom. Heavier on the Rom than the Com, but a good amount of Com.

Now then important things you should know about the book. The prologue features an incident of our male lead being a jerk and humiliating Cassandra, our female lead,  very publically in high school by making fun of her size. For me, and this is just me, I don't have a problem with a high schooler saying something mean about another high schooler, this is something that happens every day all day. I don't like it in my fiction when the female lead says terrible things about her looks to herself. Cassandra doesn't do this so the book works for me. 

I found the ending satisfying. I thought it was going to go one way when I started reading the book but it went another way that was actually better. I love the magic and the world it takes place in and I would have enjoyed more of the world, the magical rules are really fun and different. 

This book is like when you have your phone in portrait mode to take a picture. We spend this book with Cassandra and Seth in focus and getting more in focus as the story goes on while the side characters and the setting are a bit blurry. I hope that there is a second book in this series so I can see more of this world. 

Throughout the book, I felt like our main characters acted much younger than their age of twenty-seven. Especially, Seth, I decided maybe what I was supposed to understand was because he became a werewolf, and that slowed his maturity. And maybe since Cassandra doesn't know an important fact about herself, her growth is also stunted. 

My rating for this book is 4 stars, if you read it let me know, I'd love to talk about a couple of spoilery things! 

I rec'd an ARC from the publisher, all my opinions are my own! 

Thank You Net Galley! A Cryptic Clue by Victoria Gilbert

 Because I enjoy Victoria Gilbert's Booklovers B & B Cozy Series, I requested her new mystery A Cryptic Clue from Net Galley. I'm not sure if this book is categorized as a Cozy, but it does have cozy elements, including an amateur sleuth, and no swearing. 

 I think it is more in Agatha Cristie's or Sherlock Holmes's style.  Cam Clewe is a thirty-something second-generation multi-millionaire (maybe even a billionaire?). He hires Jane Hunter, a former college librarian, to catalog his extensive collection of books, memorabilia, art, and more on his sprawling estate.   Cam is a handsome introvert with anxiety issues and perhaps OCD or ADHD.  Jane has a past that involved domestic violence.  Of course, not too much time passes before someone stumbles across a body, and Cam asks Jane to help him investigate who's the killer--since he is a prime suspect.

Victoria Gilbert gives us a large, but manageable, cast of suspects and some nice red herrings.  This first book solves the main mystery of who killed the person who died at Cam's estate, and in the end, Hunter and Clewe decide to work together to solve cold cases. I enjoyed the mystery and the pairing of 30-something Cam and 60-something Jane--something a little different in the main characters. If you enjoy mysteries, give this book a try, you'll enjoy it!