The Line: Witching Savannah, Book 1

The Line is a story that appears to have more lies in it than truth.Mercy Taylor is a member of a family of powerful witches in Savannah. Their job is to anchor something called “the line,” a defense against demons who want to enter our world. Mercy’s Great Aunt Ginny is the head of the family, the actual anchor of the line, and the most powerful witch in Savannah. Mercy, in contrast, has no magic – or so she thinks.Mercy’s current job (which she created for herself) is to give what she calls Liar’s Tours – walking tours of the sights of Savannah which she narrates with a succession of stories that are mostly all lies. She doesn’t make any pretense that they are not. These tours are popular with businessmen, likely not least because several bars are included among the sites they visit. These tours sound like a lot of fun, and it’s sort of a shame that the events of the book lead to the end of the tours.On her last tour, Mercy crosses paths with Mother Jilo, a locally famous old hoodoo woman. She tells the guys on the tour the truth – at least the short version – about Mother Jilo, but they don’t believe it, and she laughingly agrees that it was all a bogus tissue of lies and moves on to their next stop. But the encounter has given her an idea.It seems that a hoodoo woman is not a true witch like most of the members of Mercy’s family but a person who ‘borrows’ magic using herbs, candles, spells, ceremonies, and the like. Mother Jilo’s main stock in trade seems to be love potions and spells to get rid of people you don’t like. Mercy’s problem is that she likes her twin sister’s fiancé more than she likes the guy who should be her boyfriend. She decides to go back and ask for a love potion to make her love her own boyfriend more. Jilo warns her that this may not be the best idea.The next morning, she receives a summons to see Aunt Ginny. She figures she is in for a lecture and possibly some sort of punishment for going to see Jilo. But when she gets there, she discovers Ginny’s dead body.This sets off a world of trouble. In addition to having to deal with normal people regarding the murder and trying to figure out who killed Aunt Ginny – it was obviously a magical event – there is all the chaos involved in finding and investing Ginny’s successor as the anchor of the line. This is supposed to be Mercy’s twin sister, Masie. But a lot of weird things start to happen too. As a result of all this, Mercy finds out that most of what she knew about her family growing up was lies. No wonder she herself was so good at lying.Given that most of her family has been lying to her, Mercy finds it no surprise that Jilo has lied to her too. But still, she feels like Jilo is the person she can most trust.So many lies have been told that it sometimes seems that even the lies are telling lies. I think some of them do. Several attempts are made on Mercy’s life. But the biggest shocker is when Maisie’s investment ceremony goes wrong and she disappears. Instead, the power of the line settles on Mercy.But there is a lot more going on here. Enough that it may take Mercy several more books to straighten it all out.

Not only is this book the debut entry in Horn’s Witching Savannah series, it appears to be his debut entry into publishing. And it is a fine entry on both counts. I don’t usually expect to give a 5-star rating to a first novel, but this book earned it – reading it in one day and into the wee hours of the morning, it earned it.The Taylor family in Savannah is a family of witches. In fact, they are essentially the founding fathers of witchdom in this section of the world, very powerful and one of only 13 such families in the world. As such, their most powerful living member has historically been entrusted with one of the 13 anchor positions that protect the Line, a supernatural web of power that keeps the world of witches separated and protected from the world of demons.As the story opens, we are introduced to our protagonist, Mercy Taylor, a 20-year-old who is the first non-witch to be born into the Taylor family. And she is despised, openly ridiculed by most family members, but not just for being born without power. She is despised for being born at all, the underdeveloped and second of female fraternal twins. Having never identified the father and choosing that second baby’s life over her own, Mercy’s mother dies shortly afterward. Mercy, only a few minutes old, is instantaneously reviled for causing the death of another witch and leaving her powerful newborn sister motherless.At least the family didn’t take her out to a distant field and leave her to die. But she is motherless, fatherless, powerless and despised in favor of the first-born twin who is not only beautiful and loved but has power to spare. However, no one in the family hates Mercy more than Ginny Taylor, her mother’s aunt and the ruling Anchor of the Line.Even though Mercy is only 20 years old, this is not a YA novel. Because of the pitiful and abusive treatment by most everyone other than her twin, she is mature far beyond her chronological age. She does not feel sorry for herself, has a great personality, loves her sister dearly and even owns her own small business. She is smart and kind and honorable. And like the Serenity Prayer beseeches, she has learned to accept a situation she cannot change. However, it is her courage to change one thing about herself that sets the novel’s plot in motion.Knowing that she cannot expect any help from her family and knowing that she is not wanting to control anyone’s behavior but her own, Mercy seeks out a spell from the local Hoodoo queen, Mother Jilo. The Anchor, Ginny Taylor, seems to know about this action immediately and demands an accounting from Mercy the next morning. When Mercy arrives at the house, she finds Ginny’s body, horribly murdered.Now with a murderer to find and a new Anchor to choose, the Taylor family comes under scrutiny by both the police and the other families that tend to the Line. At this point, the novel takes off because the family has secrets on top of secrets buried within secrets.The author has written a well-crafted paranormal mystery. While there are no vampires or werewolves hanging about, there are shadow demons, golems, ghosts, hoodoo practitioners and witches with a vast variety of skills. The story flows from scene to scene with dialogues and internal monologues that are realistic and on-point. The world-building is systematic and detailed only to the point of explaining just what is needed at the time it is needed. There are some editing errors such as missing punctuation and misplaced words. However, they are few in number and only minimally impact the reading experience.Because I did read it in one day – with only three breaks – and stayed up until one a.m. to finish, I would like to recommend that another reader do it differently than I did. There are just too many secrets, that when exposed, create a new path for the plot to take. I would suggest that the reader break the book up into at least 2 days in order to sleep on the nature of the secrets revealed and the twists to the plot that they engender. By the time I finished the book, I realized that I had been so engrossed that I had read too quickly to fully anticipate and appreciate the final chapters.

This book started well enough - a slightly above average, easy reading YA fantasy novel, but at the 85% point got really troubling. The spoiler free way to put this is that something really disturbing and immoral happens to the main character, and everyone including herself acts like it's a really good thing.The spoiler full way to put it is that the main character is put under a love spell by someone who then has sex with her. She freely admits that she wouldn't have slept with him if she hadn't been "under the influence" (the book's phrasing), was a virgin beforehand, and then finds out a couple days later that she's pregnant. Even though the pregnancy could be magically undone, she decides not to do this and that instead the most important thing is for her to forgive her rapist so that her baby can have a mother and a father (despite the large extended family she lives with). She even chooses to name the baby after her rapist's dad. She also concludes that any struggle she might have to forgive him is just her own personal failing, and that her previous failed attempt to cast a love spell on herself, which would have made her fall in love with her rapist like he wanted, is JUST AS BAD as him intoxicated her with magic and then having sex with her when he knew she wasn't in her right mind.The same scene where all of this goes down - which also happens to be her 21st birthday - she takes pity on her rapist's plaintive admission that her marrying him due to the rape-pregnancy is "more than [he] has the right to ask for", thinking to herself how sweet he is, and telling him that he's "definitely family now". Her own family are universally delighted about the situation, with the only slight criticism being one of them suggesting that she should marry her rapist before she has the child, so that they have the same surname on the birth certificate.I kept going with the 15% left after this to see if there was an explanation for this bizarre behaviour - maybe they're all under a spell or something - but no. After a very unsatisfactory conclusion, where everyone is saved not by their own actions but by literally a magical ball of light, things are wrapped up by our protagonist deciding that actually her rapist is "a good man" and that they should get married.Given that this book is aimed primarily at teenage girls, this is a really worrying, and frankly sickening message for this book to put forward. I really advise people to not get this book, or to stop reading at 85% if you already have it. Or buy this book as a gift for someone you're trying to groom into thinking that true love is only expressed through abuse.Wtf.I will not be reading anything else by this author.

Confession time, I only bought this book because the series was on offer for a price I simply could not ignore and it is a while since I last read something from this genre that didn't involve ghosts. Sometimes the Book Gods smile on us mere readers and this was one of these times.The Taylor Family are notorious in Savannah, everyone knows there's something not quite "right" about them but in a dangerous way so they garner respect through fear. Mercy and Maisie are members of the clan and heading rapidly to their 21st Birthday, a time to celebrate surely. For Mercy it is life as normal, no power, a major league crush on her twin sister's boyfriend and taking her Liar's Tour through Savannah. Maisie got all the power, the beauty and the attention of the family Matriarch, Ginny. She is being groomed to take over as The Anchor and her powers are swelling. When Ginny is found murdered a chain of events is set in motion that cannot be stopped and powerless Mercy finds herself in the middle of it all.From the HooDoo priestess Jilo and her stolen power, the golem Emmet and the 9 family representatives animating his body grown from the earth to the half-wraith little boy Wren this is a completely believable fantastical world. One where the 10 families are trying to keep the shadows at bay and protect mankind from the demons that used to run the earth. The characters within this book are varied and fully fleshed and the, almost political, machinations take this a step up from the usual magical world fare.I was hooked from the first descriptions of the Liar's Tour and would have loved to see more of that, we only get a snapshot though. The Taylor family themselves are as varied as any other, despite their obvious wealth. Somehow the author manages to weave the fantastical around all too human traits of jealousy and love without any of it feeling out of place.This is a book for fans of the genre to savour (I managed to spread it over several days by reading other books alongside it) and I am not rushing to read the next one. I want to let it all sink in before I jump in to books 2, 3 and 4.

Ginny Taylor is an anchoress of the Line which was created by witches to keep the demons out. But when Ginny is murdered most people believe her great niece Maisie will take her place. Maise's twin sister Mercy has no power at all, the first non witch Taylor. What Mercy, not anyone else could know was what impact all this would have on her.This is a great book by J.D. Horn full of interesting well thought out characters and a storyline full of twists and turns.Recommended.

I borrowed this book as part of my kindle unlimited subscription as an audiobook.The story of a girl born into a family of witches who was born without any power at all in like her twin sister. She’s sweet and funny and makes poor choices sometimes. She makes unlikely alliances and likes the wrong boy for all the wrong reasons.A great start to what promises to be an excellent series from a “new to me” author.

A family of witches where you have no magic ability could be soul destroying for a young girl especially as her sister is so powerful but mercy has grown up and excepted her fate only fate has other ideas .really enjoyed reading the beginning of what I hope will be a great series.Loved the Characters especially Mercy , Jilo and uncle oliver