The Night Raven (Crow Investigations Book 1)

The writing wasn't bad, but the story and the main character were all over the place.We are told that Lydia is a dud in a magically powerful family - but she has all kinds of special abilities (seeing and communicating with ghosts, being able to sense, identify, and resist magic, etc).Her oh so magically powerful family is instead shown to be a mostly mundane mafia, except for one uberpowerful, but apparently unstable character.The other magically powerful families apparently lost most of their power as well - except when they didn't.Lydia sees herself as meek - but is confrontational and rude to almost everyone she meets.I finished the story - still waiting for it to coalesce into something coherent.

This book was awful, and book 2 is shaping up to be just as bad (but why am I reading book 2, if book 1 was awful? I’ll get to that). I don’t consider events in the first few chapters of book 1 of a trilogy to be spoilers — it’s all set up at that point — but if you do, skip the rest of this and stick with awful.1) Lydia arrives in London, and right away is attacked by a strange man with a gun. She manages to injure the stranger almost fatally, and promptly calls the police. The Inspector recognizes her name as belonging to a currently-borderline-mob family (formerly VERY MUCH a mob family, and there’s a lot of doubt about the currently). So what do they do? They ask a few questions and tell her they’ll take a full statement later, since she’s obviously so shook up.No. There is a gun involved IN THE UK, sure the police brushed for prints but there has been zero time to process the scene, no cop anywhere is going to accept this self-defense story from a mob daughter at face value. She should have been up for a hard night of questioning. WITHOUT being a mob daughter, she should have been up for a hard night of questioning — it’s her word against the almost-dead and completely-unconscious man’s.2) She’s in London because one of her PI investigations in Scotland went wrong. The client hired Lydia’s company to prove her husband was cheating on her (the client’s husband), and Lydia did. At which point the husband became so dangerously stalkery and potentially violent that Lydia’s boss told her to get out of town for a while, for her own safety until said client’s husband forgets about her. Without pay. Which is pretty illegal.The day after Lydia arrived in London, she tells her boss she’ll need two weeks. Her boss says “I can only hold the job for two weeks.” Wait, what? They are sure the client will forget before that? The NEXT day, Lydia is removed as a client contact for being out of touch. Again, what? Scotland mandates 28 days of vacation (according to Google). Her company has NO provision for employees going on vacation? For two weeks, which is extremely normal in the UK and Europe? And when did this become Lydia’s fault and not her boss ORDERING her out of town?3) at no point are the special powers of her family explained. The other not-quite-mob families have their powers explained or hinted at, but Lydia’s family stays a mystery. I’m pretty sure this was done so that she could give anyone any power she wants as a deus ex machina.4) her uncle the probably-former-mob-boss says she is to find her “cousin Madeleine” and describes Madeleine’s mother as his aunt. Her FATHER says Madeleine’s mother is his cousin, and therefore Madeleine is Lydia’s second cousin. Honestly, I have no problem with a family lumping all the degrees of cousinship in their extended family into just “the cousins.” That’s what MY family does. We don’t treat Dee differently from Cee because Cee’s a first cousin and Dee’s a first cousin once removed. But if you’re GOING to get specific about it, then get it right! In the first place, a person is not the aunt of one brother and the cousin of the other brother. It doesn’t work that way, even if you get incestuous. In the second place, if Madeleine’s mother is Lydia’s father’s aunt, then Madeleine is Lydia’s first cousin once removed. If she’s his cousin, then Madeleine is Lydia’s second cousin.That last one may be nitpicky, but if the author isn’t going to bother with consistency in the family relationships, it makes it hard to take the whole Family (capitalized) thing seriously.Those are just the jarringly wrong notes in the first part of the first book. It goes on and on, and book 2 is just as bad. If you’re asking us to suspend our disbelief to accept magic, you MUST get the rest of the world right, or the reader is constantly thrown out of the book.So why did I finish book 1 and why am I reading book 2? Because when an author is this bad, you can learn more about how NOT to write a book than you ever can from a good author or a writing class. And at $5/book, it’s a cheaper lesson than most. I plan to read book 3 as well, and I would hope that Sarah Painter takes my $15 and puts it toward a decent editor or a good writing class.It’s a shame, because the premise is pretty original among UF. I hope someone else takes it and does a better job with it.

I would like to start off by stating that I did like this book. It has an interesting premise and the main character is likable. I recommend people who enjoy urban fantasy to read it. The issues I noticed were minor, mostly with the flow of the story and could be easily fixed with a revision. An example of this is when Lydia goes from being on the phone with her mother, then is reaching for her phone without really ending the conversation. Just small things such as that that a small sentence keeps you from going 'what?'Also, a 19 year old is not a Millennial. I am a Millennial, and I'm 34. That would be Generation Z, who is the current youngest generation. I think it's better to leave the generational scorn out of fiction so it keeps it somewhat more relatable to a wider audience.

I like a good mystery but this story dragged from the first chapter. I was 44% into the book and only 3 days had passed with nothing interesting happening. The MC is too passive for my taste, letting all the men in her life walk all over her. If prefer she step up and take action rather than whinging about things. Her constant reminders of her slack of power screamed woe-is-me.The love interest was sudden and depthless, both as a character and as a plot point. Side characters needed more development; they feel very thin.Overall not a book for me.

I am ambivalent here; I like the characters, especially Lydia Crows ghostly housemate, Jason. Lydia Crow is very much a black sheep of a black sheep family; her father ( a second son) turned his back on magic when he married out. Lydia returns to London and becomes involved in a search for her missing cousin , nineteen yr old Madelaine. I felt the book's solution came too quickly; it felt rushed to me. I would like to know Jason and Amy's story, as well as more on Lydia and her parents. This has an intriguing theory of magic, which could go in many directions

The book sample was intriguing; more so than the full book. While there are some hints about the full powers of the four rival families, not much is revealed and we only get minor and very brief encounters with 2 members of one other family and one 2 minute encounter with another. In fact, you can count on two hands the total number of characters in the book.There are large narrative plotholes: the ghost roommate? The investigator heroine doesn't do any digging to find out why he was murdered. No offense but if I found out the prior tenant of my home was murdered, you can bet I'd at least Google for more information. The author tells us often that our heroine has very little power but it's clear she's a MarySue. The mystery is solved rather quickly only to throw in a curve ball plot twist. I gave it 3 stars because I was interested enough to finish (the British slang was an interesting difference), but the fantasy aspects need more work, including detailed world building.

I look forward to a new book from Ms Painter, and this is written in her easy, engaging style. Unfortunately the publishers seem to have cut her off at a random point in the first third of a longer book, before plot or characters are fully developed, so this 'first of a series' doesn't stand alone as a good read. I would suggest waiting for the full work to come out and reading it as the author probably intended. At the moment this curtailed effort comes across as a cynical attempt to maximise profits.

This is a mediocre urban fantasy novel that never really 'gets going'. The heroine is Lydia, a young woman from a powerful London crime family who have magical abilities. Lydia has been brought up on the periphery and lacks any strong powers. Having moved to Scotland to train as a private investigator, she returns to London temporarily and is asked to investigate the disappearance of her nineteen year old cousin Madeleine. Despite being unwilling to be drawn back into the dodgy world of her family, she soon is, and various adventures ensue.It's perfectly readable and bowls along at a good pace, but I never felt fully engaged with it and I never felt it really drew me into its world. It's the first in a series so perhaps the sequels will be better, but this novel isn't strong enough to stand on its own. Too many questions are left unanswered or are never asked. The extent of Lydia's abilities and the nature of her family are only hinted at. There seem to be lots of potentially good ideas, but none of them are realised or expanded on.Lydia herself wasn't a character I bonded with particularly. It's not that she's dislikeable, but I didn't warm to her either and she's a bit too much like a template 'strong female lead' rather than being a person in her own right. That might not be a problem if the supporting characters were more developed or likeable, as that can compensate for a bland lead. But they aren't really.Ultimately, I didn't mind reading this book, it was mildly diverting, but I can't rave about it and I won't bother to read the next one. This is a genre with lots of very strong offerings and there's no need to read average novels to get your modern fantasy fix.

Whatever another reviewer may have said, the story is complete - this is not a 'part' novel. Neither does it end in a cliffhanger where you have to buy the next book to see what happens. All the loose ends and subplots are tied up nicely, with the potential for future outings of the main character added at the very end.I read this on one long afternoon and really enjoyed it. The main character is interesting and quirky. The setting is believable. The investigation doesn't 'cheat', so mystery fans have a good chance at working out what's going on at the same time the protagonist does. The supernatural/magic system was quite well worked out and limited enough to make it work.The writing is light, the vocabulary varied and the story structure is well laid out.Yes, there is some very minor repetition, and she does have a 'love interest', but nothing major. It is not 'Mills and Boon' in any way. The overall flavour is more of a dark urban fantasy. If that's your thing, grab it and find a free afternoon to curl up and enjoy the story.(No, I am not the author's friend. I had never heard of her until I picked this book up in an Amazon sale. I just hate to see bad reviews of good products.)

This book just didn't seem to ever really settle in to any sort of flow; even when it ended I still felt like I was settling in to the locations and the characters and getting my head around the overall premise. The central disappearance of a Crow family member merely serves to introduce us to Lydia's family and, by extension, some of the other London powerful 4 and never really acts as more than a manipulation of the reader to introduce us to Crow family lore and the Fox clan. It provides the opportunity to reveal the historical "facts" of the Crows but never really works as its own situation. There is no jeopardy associated with Madeleine's disappearance at all and, as a reader, I never really much cared about the whys, wherefores or if she was living or dead.Then again, I found that I wasn't really invested in any of the characters. Lydia is pretty much meh on the page and I still don't feel that I know much about her other than she is easily manipulated, can communicate with willing spirits, has been kept on the outskirts of the Family and wants to be a Private Investigator. Sounds like a lot I suppose but these are all superficial things in getting to know a character, as to her personality and what drives her I have no real idea - apart form caffeine, she does like her caffeinated beverages.I found it frustrating to read as the bare bones of a good tale are all there, they just never really get fleshed out in this first book; so much so that I do wonder if the 2 books in this series were intended to be one longer work and the publishing house hacked them in to 2 or the author was failing to meet deadline so it was forced as a compromise. This is a shame as an Urban Fantasy there is so much potential here and I would happily read the second book in the hope that the world is expanded more and that I actually start getting to know Lydia.

I’m mystified by all the five star reviews, friends maybe? This book could have been really entertaining but feels as if it’s a rushed write. It is so repetative - she repeats information just pages after the first telling and seems to feel she has to put the protagonist’s name in almost every sentence! - that the story is obscured. What could have been a fun, spooky, ‘mills and boon at midnight’ kind of book feels like an unloved tale from an author that’s pushed for time. So disappointed!