The Hex Files Bundle, Books 1-3

By: Gina LaManna

Narrated by: Allyson Ryan

Length: 25 hrs and 19 mins

Publisher's summary

This bundle includes books 1-3 in the Hex Files series, a fast-paced paranormal mystery series with a kickass heroine, hilarious sidekicks, and an immersive world that will pull you in faster than you can say pizza.

Book 1, Wicked Never Sleeps: Wicked—the paranormal sixth borough of New York—is home to witches and goblins, werewolves and necromancers, elves and vampires…and former Detective Dani DeMarco. She’s busy with the grand opening of her family’s pizza parlor when a knock on the door leaves her face to face with the stunning yet lethal vampire in charge of the NYPD's supernatural branch—and he needs her help with a high-profile double homicide.

Book 2, Wicked Long Nights: When a powerful witch goes missing from NYPD, Dani is dragged out of retirement to assist her sometimes boyfriend, sometimes boss in locating the detective before it’s too late.

Book 3, Wicked State of Mind: When a high-profile young elf is kidnapped and destined for death, Dani’s forced to go toe to toe with a kidnapper who has unlocked a secret so potent it could destroy an entire race of paranormals.

©2022 Gina LaManna (P)2022 Dreamscape Media, LLC

I love that Matthew and Danielle can work together as a couple

I didn’t like that one had to lose their life in order to keep others alive

Surprised

I’m not into these types of books (Fantasy) but I was surprised that I actually enjoyed it

Could be better!

I kinda like the story. But I find the love relationship nauseating. They can’t decide what they are doing with their feelings. Danny tells Matthew in one hand she doesn’t want the relationship then gets mad at him for telling his boss there’s no relationship. It makes no sense.
Then the story changes from Danny telling the story to a narrator telling the story frequently. One minute she is saying “I” the the next she’ll chapter it refers to Danny by name. It’s a good pass the time story, very shallow, not much mystery or surprising plot Twist. The narrator, she’s pretty good with voice differentiation. Well done!

Poorly executed, naration is fine though

So listen, when you're reading a noir mystery or a paranormal romance, there are some things that have to happen for the book to be true to genre, and when the book is paranormal noir those conventions are going to intersect. Fans of both genes know what to expect. There's going to be some florid prose, tropes all over the place, somebody's going to scoff at feelings, somebody's going to get turned on by somebody's personal scent, somebody's going to mistake lust for love (that somebody might be the author), at least once the prose will turn downright violet when describing the weather and/or the main characters' physiques, and similes will be stretched to the breaking point. Somebody's muscles will get compared to stone. Somebody's going to get framed for the crime and the hard bitten investigator is going to be surprised when they discover the truth.

And if you love the genres, you know all this can be executed in fun and joyously creative ways. Ways in which the troops are played well, and knowing basically what to expect just lowers the emotional stakes so the reader can enjoy the journey. Even when it's executed in a mediocre way it's still pretty fun, but when it's well executed it's gold.

Sorry, folks, this ain't it. This is the least fun, most hackneyed and tiresome tripe I've slogged through in a longwhile. These books lean hard into the cringiest and most painfully unrealistic tropes while the more fun tropes get glossed over. In romance a sexiness fail can at least be funny, but nope, this was tiresome-shading-to-cringey. And the number of times I found myself grousing to the author "that's not what that word means" and "even in a world with an illl-defined magic system, that's not how that works/would work" was just... very distracting.

Oh, and those chiseled muscles? It's never explained, (and seriously, this could have been played as a gloriously self aware genre parody, but no, it's just baffling-shading-to-boring ), but apparently the vampire is literally made of stone and that's supposed to be... sexy? At least when Meyers made her vampires sparkle, she explained what was up with that, because hey, that's a unique and creative thing we don't know in advance to expect from vampires. LaManna doesn't even try to explain the "he's a moving statue but also somehow sexy" thing.

Oh, and the foreshadowing about the titular artifacts? In all three books the Hex Files are at most mentioned and there's some slight foreshadowing in the epilogues of books 2 & 3 that indicates somebody out there might do something about it.... IDK another few books from now?

The narrator was pretty good, I think she did the best she could with what she was given, but wow do I ever wish I hadn't spent a credit on this.