Liked it. Read it at night and I havke to admit that there were a lot of strange noises around :) ( )

This is the third Rowan Gant investigation book I've read (although chronologically, it's the second in the series), and while the author seems to have learned a little about the craft of writing since the first book, all the things that made me hiss and spit and chant 'no, no, no, no, no' plaintively as I read are still there. *sigh*

Basically, at the beginning of the book, Mr Sellars has a big note to the effect that the books are written in a first person narrative voice, which means he's writing the way his protagonist, Rowan Gant, thinks; and that this voice may therefore not necessarily be grammatically correct. OK, lack of grammatical correctness in a narrative voice, I can deal with. No - my issue is that firstly, Rowan apparently doesn't narrate the way he thinks – or if he does, he doesn't think the way he speaks.

In essence, we have someone whose dialogue is all in pretty standard conversational language – casual, reasonable mixture of long and short sentences, frequent contractions. Whenever we have anything outside of quotation marks, however – description, exposition or reasoning – the language suddenly becomes unbelievably verbose, with sentences that frequently run over three or more lines; word choices that read as though the author felt that failure to use a thesaurus at least twice per sentence would be letting the creative team down; and generally, an apparent belief that any use of a short, simple word where a more erudite polysyllabic circumlocution could say the same thing with added complexity was simply unacceptable.

That, plus some lousy editing (use of apostrophes in plurals, lack of apostrophes in possessives, and a lack of commas that led to some mindboggling ambiguities, none of which should count as 'bad grammar justified that's by a first person narrative voice') created constant frustration for me as I read through the book. I lost count of the number of times I was jarred out of the story by little typos – it wasn't a matter of being offended by improper punctuation, so much as annoyance at being forced to work out what the hell the author was trying to before I could get on with the story.

Now, the more pragmatic amongst you might ask why I bothered to keep reading (and, indeed, finish) the book if the writing style annoyed me so much. My answer is twofold. First, Mr Sellars is a Pagan author with a character who (stigmata, channelled visions and telepathic links with his wife aside) reasonably accurately portrays a Witch who's active in both the Pagan community and the mundane day-to-day world of earning a crust. This makes me want to like and support the author's books: I just keep hoping that as he gets more and more practiced at the craft of writing, the issues I'm seeing will get less and less obvious. Unfortunately, so far, I can't quite manage it (the liking, I mean – the supporting I'm still doing).

My second reason is that underneath the writing style with all its niggles, I actually think Mr Sellars has some great plot ideas and some solid characters with whom I can often identify (not that they couldn't do with a bit of development to flesh them out sometimes, but they definitely have the potential there). It just bugs me that the massively overwritten narrative style, gets in the way of that potential for me.

The plot, for those who are still with me after that lead-in, revolves around a set of brutal serial killings, all perpetrated by an individual who seems intent on resurrecting the Burning Times in St Louis. The killer appears to be using the Malleus Mallficiarum as a guide for both his methods and his victims; and he leaves bibles with highlighted verses at each crime scene. And once more, our friend Rowan and his faithful sidekick, Detective Benjamin Storm (along with a cast of a few others) have to find out who and why.

The 400-odd pages they spend doing this interested me enough that I had no problem finishing the book, even though I found myself constantly reading a passage, and then having to to go back and edit it in my mind before I could move on to the next one. I actually found some of the 'educational' crime scene exposition interesting too – especially since it often mirrored bits and pieces I've been picking up from my Criminal Minds watching (yes, I know that's fiction too... but it's reasonably well written fiction).

So all up, my gut feeling is that, while the ideas and the structures behind the book are actually not too bad, the execution, as with the previous Rowan Gant books I've read, lets it down horribly. I'm trying to think of who I'd recommend the books to, and to be honest, I'm coming up blank. Ratings-wise, I think I'd give it an 8/10 for potential, but unfortunately, the writing style gets in the way enough that the final figure drops to a 5.5/10 for the actual story. Which is a shame – because it would just take a good editor and a bit of work to see it reaching that potential. ( )

This is the second in the Rowan Gant series, set in St. Louis, Mo, and
featuring a male witch as the main character. I tried to like this series,
but I simply don't. The first book was extremely gory, with far too vivid
descriptions of the spectacular murders, and this one follows that pattern.
There's just too much "woo-woo" witchy stuff, too, from prophetic dreams and
recurring ghostly characters (murder victims from the first book coming back
to help solve murders in this one? Come on!) and it simply felt way too
contrived to me. This was a DNF and I won't be trying anymore in this
series. ( )

Review located at http://lupabitch.wordpress.com/2007/05/06/never-burn-a-witch-mr-sellars/ ( )

Another exciting Rowan Grant mystery. This time he is rattled by a religious serial killer who believes he is ridding the world of evil by killing the Witches of St Louis. The book is a little more graphic than the previous book and it still has the obsessive descriptions of his wife's hair colour, but the story is strong and a reader can easily overlook all that. Like the first book I kept reading to the end even at the expense of other more productive things I should have been doing. I liked the fact that the ending was not so neat and tidy and most mystery thrillers. Rowan gets more human in this book, which added to his character. HIs wife was not really in this story at all.
Another great pagan fiction book ( )