Summary:

Romance is in the air on Harrington Street, Oxford. Detective Inspector Ian Chisholm is finally showing interest in Lucy, though the members of the vampire knitting club aren’t too thrilled to have the police hanging around so close to Cardinal Woolsey’s yarn shop. Up the street at Frogg Books, shop assistant Alice is in love with her bookish boss, Charlie, who doesn’t seem to notice.

Lucy’s trying to become more proficient as a witch and when her cousin Violet talks her into brewing up a love potion to bring Alice and Charlie together, it seems like a harmless way to improve her craft.

Until someone dies.

Is Lucy’s love potion more deadly than cupid’s arrow? Or is there a killer on the loose?

Goodreads

Thoughts:

This is a series I became addicted to late last year so I was really excited for this latest installment of this supernatural cozy mystery. It didn’t let me down and I continue to be a fan.

Keeping up with the theme of February when the book was released, this story focuses on love! So appropriate for Valentine’s Day! But it’s not just Lucy’s love life the story hinges on, but rather there are multiple tales of love being told at once, some of them with dire consequences (dun dun dun!).

In this one the local college is putting on a play which Lucy becomes involved with as a volunteer, helping one of her vampire friends out with the sets. The play is Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Thanks to the love potion Lucy gives her friend the characters in the story are soon involved in the their own love hi-jinks with a bunch of mixed up love-lines everywhere. I found this aspect of the story quite fun, the way it mirrored the plot of the play in some ways. And even though these are light and fun reads, the mixed up love lines made for some great storytelling with some darker undertones. Love isn’t all sunshine and roses after all, and jealousy can lead to some pretty bad consequences.

I like that Lucy is branching out and using her magic more although I do wish she wouldn’t let herself be pressured so much to do things a certain way just because they work for others, or to do them when she isn’t ready. She’s still working on her confidence after all. It’s good to see that she seems to be making a step in the right direction with her magic by the end of this story though! I really hope that she continues in that direction.

The one thing that I missed in this story were the vampires! I really could have done with more interaction between Lucy and the various vampires that live beneath her knitting shop–they’re one of the highlights of the series for me. I mean, I love Rafe, don’t get me wrong (brooding ancient vampires are kind of my thing) but I love all of the other characters too and it would have been great to see more of them here. Although, admittedly, I do kind of understand having them take a back seat here as the cast of characters was already quite high with all of the folks from the play being added.

Overall, this was another fun edition of The Vampire Knitting Club series and I’m having a great time reading these. They’re great for lovers of cozy mysteries, vampires, or readers who like light and fluffy reads. 4/5 stars.