While I recognized a lot of strong parallels to female lead urban fantasy hits like Kate Daniels or Mercy Tomson it was on a level I felt acceptable.
It's an incredibly standard plot that is somewhat spoiled by the blurb from the getgo.
Strong stolen magical artifact, could destroy the city, yadda yadda.
But if you are not after the invention of the wheel I initially thought this might be entertaining nonetheless.
But it wasn't to be.
We begin with instalove, bad enough but 95% of the genre suffers from it anyway so whatever,
At first, the story was mostly fine but, pretty far into the book, suddenly everything descended into a torrent of bullshit.
Then the main character is made out to be this incredibly badass chick with an incredibly fucked up and hard past that left her with trust issues.
(And I am not saying this lightly. It's even fucked up compared to the average fucked up past of main characters.)
But she apparently becomes absurdly gullible and stupid to nauseating levels as a cheap and lazy plot device for drama to commence. This came so much out of left field that I was completely baffled. And it's not one thing I am mad about. It's a continuous stream of shit, each sentence worse than the last on a plethora of levels.

Here is a spoilery explanation of what exactly went wrong.

The cunning vamp with his own incredibly obvious agenda to insinuate himself into her life that we have been told was neither trustworthy nor close to Alice in any way, the guy that she wasn't even willing to trust with the safety of a random client, tells her something out of the blue which is clearly completely in his own interest, something Sean (her love interest) vehemently denies. It's a morsel of information the vamp normally would never have willingly given up without getting something in exchange.
But she just blindly believes Charles (the shady vamp) over the guy she likes and trusts enough to give access to her personal library (which is a big deal), to give up control, open her shields, and whatnot.
Then she isn't even willing to listen to Sean's defense of himself despite him explaining to her that he has a way to undeniably prove that he didn't orchestrate any of what he is accused of.
Then Charles follows Sean to her place and provokes a fight claiming obviously false necessity of protection. The vamp that never gave anything for free before. That includes selflessly jumping into a "fight" that is not his own.
Then the situation gives this vamp access to her blood as well as a look at her body/scars. The blood and body she was willing to die over rather than expose (because of magical reasons related to her bad past she escaped from). She does nothing about it. She just gives both up for a bit of first aid which she didn't even really need to that vamp.

This was such a sudden and incredible streak of bullshit and it just wouldn't end, I don't even care anymore.
Hard dnf right there.
It might be that all this temporary insanity isn't even going to be relevant to the plot. Maybe it turns out the vamp is totally a good guy that just encourages a facade to protect himself or whatever. Or maybe he didn't actually get hold of anything incriminating despite the circumstances. I don't know. I don't care.
I liked where this was going initially and it worked for me.
I was interested in the characters and invested in the MC.
But there is a limit to the willing suspension of disbelief especially about the personalities of people.
Fuzzy magic is fine in soft magic systems. It's magic after all. A bit of suspension of disbelief is necessary anyway. But not the protagonist's personality.
This is an insult to the reader's intelligence if anything.
Sad. ( )

Good

Solid world-building, strong characters, and excellent writing. The right amount of characters and ‘types’ of magic to make a tight story and not bury a reader in irrelevant details.

Includes mages (earth air water fire blood), werewolves (cats are mentioned but not present), vampires, and an offhand mention of unicorns and fae that seemed to indicate they were not around.

The romance gets fairly graphic.

No noticeable proofreading issues.

I will get the next novel in the series. Best recommendation I can make. ( )

Good

Solid world-building, strong characters, and excellent writing. The right amount of characters and ‘types’ of magic to make a tight story and not bury a reader in irrelevant details.

Includes mages (earth air water fire blood), werewolves (cats are mentioned but not present), vampires, and an offhand mention of unicorns and fae that seemed to indicate they were not around.

The romance gets fairly graphic.

No noticeable proofreading issues.

I will get the next novel in the series. Best recommendation I can make. ( )

Refreshing...

What a great first book. There is plenty of action, magic, vampires, werewolves and evil to make an intriguing tale, My only disappointment is that there is only one book in this series so far and I have to wait for the rest. Lisa Edmonds is an excellent story teller. The relationships between the characters and their actions are well thought out and easy to believe. I enjoyed this book thoroughly and am eagerly awaiting the next one. ( )

Good piece of writing, interesting characters, dark backstory and action and dialogue that keep things moving. Alice Worth sounds like an intelligent magic user with a hidden past that begs to be explored, while the present has its own problems. Read the sample only but it leaves the reader wanting to know more. ( )