Review: Ashes and Arsenic

Ashes and Arsenic by S.M. Reine

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Ready for the same womanizing, magic allergic, OPA agent you’ve come to know as Cesar Hawke? We go back into his head in this installment of the series, diving back into a twisty-turny world where you can’t trust anyone, especially not your employer.

Cesar is temporarily in charge while Fritz is traveling and it’s gone to his head. Taking the lesser of two evils, he assigns himself to a bank robbery that he assumes will be relatively easy to solve. Unfortunately it ends up throwing him into an investigation that involves his “reformed” delinquent brother, sneaky women, his family’s shady magic past, and lots of paranoia. Seeing his brother on the security video should have easily meant that he was the bank robber, right? Well, in a world of magic, illusion can be used to do a lot of things. Cesar is forced to reassess everything he thinks he knows as oodles of secrets and lies come to light.

While I don’t particularly like the things that Cesar thinks, or the way he acts, or his blind spots for family and women, he’s still a pretty good investigator. Somehow, while bumbling around, getting kidnapped, and making incorrect assumptions, he ends up solving all the mysteries. It must be a combination of luck and magic. I don’t know why, but I can’t stop reading Cesar’s tale.




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