Hard Magic

Paranormal Scene Investigations, Book 1

By: Laura Anne Gilman

Narrated by: Romy Nordlinger

Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's summary

Welcome to P.U.P.I. - Private, Unaffiliated, Paranormal Investigations. A handpicked team trained to solve crimes the regular police can't touch - crimes of magic.

"My name's Bonnie Torres. Recent college grad, magic user, and severely unemployed. Until I got a call out of nowhere to interview for a job I hadn't applied for. It smelled fishy, but the brutal truth was I needed the work - so off I went. Two days later I'm a PUPI - me and Nick, Sharon, Nifty, and Pietr. Five 20-somethings, thrown into an entirely new career in forensic magic.

"The first job we get is a doozy: proving that the deaths of two Talents were murder, not suicide. Worse, there are high-profile people who want us to close up shop and go away. We're sniffing out things they'd rather keep buried. Looks as if this job is gonna get interesting. The only problem is, we're making it up as we go along...."

©2010 Laura Anne Gilman (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

Novel ideas, world and enjoyable

I enjoyed this book, which is saying something for me right now because so many books have bored me enough I haven’t finished.
One big disgruntled point: this is twice now a book just stops before story is finished. Just cuts off. The ending of this book even admitted the story continues in the next book. I beg that if this is to be a trend PLEASE say Part 1 and Part 2. Cliffhangers are one thing. But just flat stopping the action without any resolution is plain irritating. So I think I’ll take a star off just for that. Narrators voice is lively. I have to admit at the beginning I was confused as to who was who and had hard time figuring out”the world” Bonnie lived in but it became clearer quickly. I also prefer a bit more variance in voices of characters to know who’s talking but that has to be hard and don’t want to criticize narrator for that.

Great all round and terrific narrator!

I loved this. It was suspenseful and romy nordlinger was spot on with her narration. Looking forward to the next!

Not A Romance

Struggled to finish. There was little to none romantic plot, and what could have been an interesting magic theme, was overdone.

annoyance

The readers voice is so annoying she sounds like the switchboard operator from the office

Couldn't Finish

Listened to all but the last two hours. I wanted to like this story, especially after investing such a large amount of time in it, but just couldn't go any further. It was boring, tedious and droned on forever going nowhere. The story had potential but the plot was bogged down and buried. The narrator also mispronounced a number of words, which was painful.

Couldn't listen, too much rambling

Sorry couldn't make it past 30 minutes. once the girl started rambling I had to quit.

Hoping for more

I struggled with this novel in the beginning as the character building is necessary but lacked...not sure what..but I didn't connect with the characters or their struggles. I like the paranormal investigative side of the story but the one problem I did have was.....no one likes to be asked/told to do something without a rational understanding or reason and the fact the 2 bosses aren't above board doesn't promote safety or team building but what felt like "shifty" characters to me.

I liked how each of the paranormal investigators had different powers but were limited which gave dimensions to the characters but the secrets each one kept irritated me more than captured my interest. I think there was supposed to be love interests in denial but this part of the story was poorly generated as it came off more like a 4th grader with a crush on their teacher.

So why did I give it 4 stars ? I liked the creativity of personalities, and the reason why the paranormal investigation team was created. Overall it was an ok book, I'm hoping book 2 captures me with the ground work covered from book 1.

Kept waiting for something of interest

The whole story seemed like preparation for something to happen. When I did happen it was at the very end, and the killer was not identified; though the next book talks like it was solved.
I do not like to diss anything but I didn’t get hooked on this one.

Only on chapter 3

Ok this is really bugging me. The narrator states that the character was transported 100 miles from NYC to Boston. Uhm... the author could have looked up the mileage from NYC to Boston in a simple Google search! It’s 215 miles. It may seem like a like thing but it annoys the heck out of me when a book is poorly researched

Interesting story, unfortunate voice acting...

The voice acting is bad. Period. Ms. Nordlinger isn't able to perform male voices at all, her breaths sound almost exaggerated they're so loud and prevalent..... and the worst is that she incorrectly emphasizes words so that entire sentences change meaning. I forced myself to listen all the way through, but there's no way I'll listen to the next one. I just can't.