Tarnished and Torn: A Witchcraft Mystery by Juliet Blackwell

              I really zipped through Tarnished and Torn.  Staying up far too late reading, when I should have been asleep, it should not be that surprising that I got through this book so fast.  I’m not sure it took me even twenty-four hours.  That’s how much all I wanted to do was read.

                Lily is doing her best to move forward now that Sailor, a man she greatly cares about, has up and left town without a word.  Her friends are definitely trying to help Lily feel better.  One of the ways they attempt to get Lily’s mind off of things is by taking her to a local gem show.  While there, she might find some interesting things for her vintage clothing store.

                What starts out as a pleasant outing quickly gets turned on its head when a fire breaks out.  While everyone else runs for the exits, Lily finds herself drawn to one of the vendors.  She finds the woman, Griselda, pressed to death, which is a common torture technique used against witches.

                Unsettled by what she saw, and the method that was used, Lily sets out to find out all that she can about Griselda.  Unfortunately, Griselda’s assistant, Johannes, is missing.  When Lily goes to the bed and breakfast where he and Griselda were staying, all Lily finds is a ransacked room.  Clearly someone was looking for something.  The question is, did they kill Griselda to get it?

                Griselda and the ransacked room are not the only mysteries Lily must solve, though.  The fire that was started at the gem show seems to have been created by a demon.  Why the demon is in town Lily doesn’t know, but it seems to be connected to the fire dancing that Lily’s employee and friend, Maya, has gotten herself addicted to.  Gene, the man who runs the fire dances, was at the gem show.  Lily met him there, and immediately she felt there was something about him that wasn’t right.  Out of concern, Lily tries to warn Maya about the fire dances, but she refuses to listen.  With Maya possibly in danger, figuring out what is going on with the fire dances becomes much more urgent.

                On top of all this, Lily’s estranged father is in town.  He has not come to town to see Lily, but to look for something.  That something is an object that will release him from a demon’s hold.  When Lily and her father meet up, he asks her to do whatever she can to find the object he needs.  I mean whatever she can.  The danger Lily may have to put herself, or someone else, in does not matter as long as he gets what he wants.  This does not sit well with Lily, but this man is her father, and she must figure out how much she’s willing to help him, if at all.

                With so much going on with the demon and the people involved with it, the death of Griselda and who could have killed her kind of gets lost.  In fact, at one point in the book, I had to pause and ask myself if there had been a murder.  That’s how lost the Griselda storyline got.  Not that it made me unhappy with the book, though.  If I had been, I probably would not have read it so quickly.  Instead I would have either skimmed the rest of the book or put it down altogether.  I didn’t do either one of those things, and I found myself reading a very happy ending.