Taking Time

Emma Merrigan is a 40-something in not the most glamourous of occupations. By day, she's a librarian. As she sleeps, she goes into the Never-never and moots curses. In this book, she's trying to sort out a curse that's followed a family for several generations. Sadly, she doesn't really answer how this is going to happen and leaves us hanging. I very much enjoyed the book, but I would have preferred some resolution for this one rather than having to wait til the next episode.

This is a great series. I enjoyed the first two immensely, and had a hard time putting this one down. Emma is not the run-of-the-mill heroine. She's middle-aged, twice-married, holds down a real job, and has a complex relationship with the mother who abandoned her as a child (and looks like her daughter). Plus a hot romance with a long-dead French swashbuckler with whom she hunts and moots curses. The only thing I didn't like about this one is the abrupt ending. Even though a sequel is obviously forthcoming, a few pages of wrap-up would have made it more satisfying. I highly recommend this book to fans of contemporary fantasy.

From the day I picked up the first book in this series I knew that Lynn Abbey had written something special. At last, someone was writting urban fantasy for the woman I had become. The main character in this story, Emma, is a woman of a certain age ahead of two bad marriages, some good step children, her father's death and her mother's disappearance when she was an infant. In the first book in the series her mother reappears and Emma's life has not been the same since.Emma is a curse hunter, one of a group of people with special powers and the ability to travel to another dimension. Their goal is to destoy the curses that are nurtured by human misfortune. But Emma came to her talent late and did not have the indoctrination of most curse hunters so she is a wild card, or a black sheep as her stepfather says. In this section of the story while trying to moot a particularly odd curse she runs into the Curia, the official curse hunter society and must deal with not just the curse but the other hunters as well.Blaise, her ghostly SO, makes an appearance along with other characters from the earlier books. While I probably should knock a star off because this book is obviously a wind up for the next book, I'm not going to do it. These books are too scarce to damn with faint praise. So at the top of lungs: THANK YOU MS ABBEY, THIS BOOK REALLY HIT THE SPOT.