I would very much have liked to leave a favorable review. Unfortunately, info-dumping often substitutes for characterization and the POV wobbles, for example sometimes hewing closely to one character's perspective and then shifting to the omniscient narrator mid-scene. Additionally there are weird right-wing overtones (so-called diversity quotas characterized as "nonsense" by a supposedly sympathetic woman character, for example) and clunky dialogue (a character, informed that "kirk" is "Scottish for church" -- common knowledge, surely, and not "Scottish" but just Scottish-inflected English? -- replies "You learn something new every day!"

This has the bones of a good book but it's in need of structural work and strong line editing. I won't post this review online.

The title really got me on this book. I really liked it! It's great for Halloween season. Great writing and plot.

I wasn't sure what I was going to make of this one but it dragged me right in. There was so much to like about this book that I had to have a little think about where to start

So we follow Alex, a cop who's in a pretty happy relationship with his rich boyfriend, and he's a thinker. There's a case that was meant to be closed and he wants to give it one more try, this works but he's then outed as a magic user at work. Not what he wanted at all. Then he gets sent off to work with the Magic Squad on a case that's causing them problems, unfortunately this means he has to work with his ex. I don't want to go too much into more of the plot but there are chapters with flashbacks to when Alex attended magic school and why he left, along with working the case in the present day and how it's affecting his relationships outside of work.

Honestly? I liked this a lot more than I expected to and even though it's pretty much set up as a standalone I wouldn't be against reading a sequel if it happened. The idea of how the magic system works with the 'affinities' and being able to learn more with practice was pretty cool. The summoning and necromancy side was interesting and there were scenes in the flashbacks which had textbook chapters so that we, as readers, could be given the information in the same way the characters would learn it.

The only thing that brought it down for me was the 'historian' aspect. I couldn't keep track of all the suspects and I wasn't exactly sure how Alex had narrowed in on the final suspect in the end. I would definitely recommend this if you like urban fantasy though. I don't read a lot of Australian books so it was nice to see a new setting too.