The Trouble With Witches: A lot of fun

The Trouble With Witches by Shirley Damsgaard

After reading Witch Way to Murder, I found myself craving another Ophelia and Abby mystery and went to the library for my “fix.” They didn’t have book two, Charmed to Death, but they did have book three, The Trouble With Witches. I decided, what the heck, you can usually read these cozy mystery series out of order anyway. Often, authors will only allude vaguely to events of previous books in case you’re reading them out of sequence.

Well, I figured out pretty quickly that Shirley Damsgaard doesn’t do that. I have now thoroughly spoiled myself for Charmed to Death until enough time passes that I forget the killer’s name. But The Trouble With Witches was a lot of fun anyway. The plot revolves around Ophelia and Abby’s investigation of a psychic-research organization that may or may not be a cult responsible for the disappearance of a teenage girl.

Whatever happened in Charmed to Death must have been good for Ophelia. She still has trouble sometimes making herself be sociable, but she’s not the rude, standoffish Ophelia of Witch Way to Murder. She lets more people past her armor now and it makes her more interesting (and much less irritating).

If there’s anything about Ophelia that bugged me this time around, it’s that sometimes she needed a good whack with the clue stick. She’s sometimes incredibly oblivious when the plot needs her to be. [SPOILER. Highlight the text if you want to read it:] There are two characters who, it’s said time and time again, have exactly the same outlandish hair color. Yet when Ophelia finds a dead body with hair of that color, she jumps to the conclusion that Person A is dead when it’s just as likely that Person B is the one who bit the dust.

The central red herring, though, works really well; I was suspicious of the wrong person until the very end. [END SPOILER]

I’ll be reading more in this series, even if I do need to wait a while before backtracking to Charmed to Death!