Title Of Book: Unearthly Magik (Black Cauldron Detective Agency Book 1)
By: Matilda Reyes
Genre: Fantasy
Sub-Genre: Urban Fantasy, Paranormal, Futuristic, Dark Fantasy
Blurb:
Rivals. Impossible cases. Supernatural war.
Ava Ramos is one furious mage. New York City is her town, and she and her Black Cauldron Detective Agency know every beat of the supernatural underground. Need an object found or secrets uncovered? Ava and her partners are the mages to contact. A former rival, Tasis, shows up with a case that proves Ava just might not know everything about her town.
The Lauret Grimoire, the oldest known compendium of the supernatural, has gone missing from one of the most closely guarded magikal libraries in the city. The mages assigned to guard the damned thing can’t find any clues. Tasis is one of those mages.
Now, Tasis is calling in the last favor Ava owes him. Ava never breaks her word, so she and the Black Cauldron Detective Agency take the impossible case.
Can they find The Lauret Grimoire before anyone in the supernatural underground gets their hands on it? Or will a supernatural war start in Ava’s backyard?
Excerpt:
Someone was getting hurt tonight.
I didn’t want to do it, but from everything I read in my target’s file, this man wasn’t the type to go down quietly. Though my agency usually didn’t take jobs that required getting our hands dirty, the money was too good, and business was slow. He was a bad man, allegedly, so making a few bucks from this transaction didn’t bother me much.
Transaction.
That was what my partners and I decided to call this manhunting mission for an even scarier guy, a mobster, just to ease our collective conscience.
I shook my head and focused. One reliable thing about Manhattan was how much time riders spent standing on platforms waiting for trains. The other thing was that there
were always, always people waiting with you no matter what the hour. Tonight was no different, and that worried me. If my target fought dirty, there was a risk of casualties—
too many people around who might get hurt.
I smoothed my long, wavy, black hair into a secure ponytail, then pretended to take a few selfies with the poster of some godawful movie that my best friend made me see behind me. The shorter than average height, with thick, light brown hair parted to the left and neatly trimmed above his ears. His face had no discerning features that would have linked him
to one ethnicity or another. His skin was warm olive, the kind that darkened ten shades in the sun, and his round, brown eyes told me nothing as they met mine.
Shit.
After thirty-six hours of following this man around, he finally made me. Exhausted as I was, there was no excuse for this. I was a damn good detective, and I should have been on top of my game. I’d beat myself up later for not cornering him earlier and saving myself the trouble of a fight.
The subway station was danker than usual, a mix of trash leaking across the platforms and into the tracks, marijuana, and the stink of someone eating something unfortunate like fish. I glanced at the puddles of grossness I’d have to avoid, both trash and the creepy men who
watched my every move. They didn’t scare me, but I felt terrible for the women who dealt with this shit every day. Most Ordinaries were terrible beings with no regard for one another or the earth. I liked to think I was a good person, violent tendencies aside, and sometimes I wished I could take some time off from my day job and go all vigilante around the city. I was a Gray Mage and a damned talented one at that. No one would know the difference. Ordinaries would vaguely remember seeing a blur. Other Mages would talk behind my
back, but I was used to that. No one got into my line of work to make friends, and I was no exception.
The fact that he wasn’t turning any heads helped him blend in with the crowd of increasingly disgusting-smelling Ordinaries. Cripes, didn’t these people bathe? And why the hell were they crowding me? Why couldn’t they be like the few Ordinaries I liked?
I wasn’t sure what exactly this man had done to get on Antonio Vespucci’s shit list, and I didn’t care all that much to be honest. Vespucci alluded to the target being a bad, bad man, the kind that desperately needed to be taken off the streets. Coming from the Mage world’s most notorious mobster, which was saying a lot.
I pretended to take another picture, pursing my lips like an idiot, and snapped as many frames of my target as I could. It wasn’t enough to fool him. He may not have known who I was, but he had to have known people were looking for him. He shook out his arms and legs as if preparing for a fight.
Damnit. He was going to run, and I hated running.
The man watched me for another long moment, likely trying to figure out if I were an actual threat and found me lacking. Ooh, that boiled my blood, so I did what any pissed
off Mage would do. I flipped up the gray hood of my jacket and waited for him to respond. He gasped, and I knew that he’d just figured out exactly who I was.
Good.
In the Magikal world, the gray hood was symbolic of my allegiance to no one and nothing outside of my own coven, not even Mages of the same elemental kinship. Gray Mages
worked for their own interests and nothing more. We determined whether or not to get involved in an issue based on what we got out of the situation. We tended to be the most skilled and dangerous because we played with all types of magik, the left and right hands, good and bad, black and white, blah, blah, blah, all that crap that good little Mages feared.
I tended to engage in New York City’s underground supernatural world, and that meant I knew all the dirty tricks. I also wasn’t above a good fistfight, so there was that.
Where to buy Unearthly Magik (Black Cauldron Detective Agency Book 1)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BBQ9QWHG
What People are Saying:
5 Stars – “Mystery. Magik. Manhattan. The world is bigger than what lies on the surface.”
5 Stars – “This is a book I found incredibly difficult to put down.”
5 Stars – “Fast-paced and extremely engaging.”
5 Stars – “Twists and turns, and even a few curve balls here and there.”
5 Stars – “It’s one thing to create a mystery and adventure around the magical genre, but another to bring it to life in the way I’ve seen in this book!”
Meet Matilda Reyes:
Matilda Reyes was born and raised in New York City. After an eight-year stint in Los Angeles, she moved to South Florida, which she’s still trying to love. She loves living by the ocean. She owns more books than she could possibly read in this lifetime and has no compunctions about buying more. Her favorite genres to read are urban fantasy and paranormal romance though she’ll read anything you put in front of her. Her newest series, the Black Cauldron Detective Agency, kicks off with the release of book one, Unearthly Magik, in 2022. Matilda lives in the Miami area with her husband and dog, Jon Snow.
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