This was a good book, and I didn't like it. I'm trying to figure out why.

Morris is a sort of modern Van Hellsing, or more accurately, a modern Quincey Morris, Van Hellsing's American counterpart. (But really, who remembers Quincey Morris?) Like the back copy says "Quincey Morris and his "consultant", white witch Libby Chastain, are hired to free a family from a deadly curse that appears to date back to the Salem witch trials."

Not mentioned is a parallel story about African American FBI agent Dale Fenton, and his visiting counterpart from the South African police force Van Dreenan, who are searching for the agent behind a string of child murders and mutilations.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

So why didn't I like it? I think in part because the book presupposes a world view I don't share. I am uncomfortable with the very title of the book: Black Magic Woman? It seems to suggest a sort of exotic 'she', the unknowable and mysterious feminine.

Although Van Dreenan and Fenton don't know this, the children are being murdered by a South African woman, in order to extract various organs to make fetishes. (Not the sexy kind.) When you have a white South African as the agent of justice, law, and righteousness, and a Black woman as the agent of superstition, perversion, and evil, I'd like at least an acknowledgement from the book that this is sort of problematic.

And then there are the Salem witch trials, which in this book condemned at least one guilty woman, and it seems to hint, perhaps more. In urban fantasy, it makes sense that at least some historical instances of suspected witchcraft would be actual witchcraft, and yet this didn't sit well with me.

So, basically, I seem to be saying I didn't like this book because it failed to conform to my worldview, which seems very petty of me, but there you go.