A Charming Crime by Tonya Kappes (Urban Fantasy, mystery)

June Heal inherited her homeopathic cure business, run out of a flea market stall, from her mother.   Her own potions and cures evidently are better than her mother's, but she keeps the name of her 'shop' which is 'A Dose of Darla.'

When her backyard shed/laboratory blows up, she is forced to sell her house and move to another city where she is surrounded by strange people who all seem to know her.

Then someone is murdered and she is the main suspect in the case.

While the genre and even, at first glance, the subject may be right along the lines of what i generally favor, this story fell short.   There were far too many oddly used or misused words, leaps of logical and magical jumps for me to suspend disbelieve and immerse myself in the story.

Among other things, everyone in this town is a 'psychic.'   They all have different skills and abilities, but they are all called 'spiritualists.'

There were all kinds of bizarre rules for the town, one of which was that each family could only have one shop in town, therefore it was forbidden for one shop owner to fall in love or have a relationship with another.  Also, anyone not of pure blood was banned from the town and some people were 'half-banned' which I never quite understood.

A lot of questions and issues were answered by 'using intuition' and flinging random herbs around.

There was also a rule that one spiritualist could not read another without permission, but they would all start to say things about the future to the young woman and then when June asked for clarification, they would say something to the effect of 'I am forbidden to read you."  and then they would wander off.


There are just too many things that bothered me about this story to list here and I won't spoil the ending, even if I thought it was illogical and unsupported.

Mind you, I am not saying that this story or author are without potential.  I did like a character or two, but in my opinion, it would take a major overhaul and some hard work to make this into something readable.