Charmed Waters

A Cormac and Amelia Story

By: Carrie Vaughn

Narrated by: Neil Hellegers

Horsetooth Reservoir is an artificial body of water in land-locked Colorado. So how did a mermaid end up there? Cormac, former bounty hunter turned supernatural problem solver, doesn't much care how she got there.

But he's determined to get her home, no matter who tries to stop him. And a surprising number of people are trying to stop him.

©2021 Carrie Vaughn, LLC (P)2022 Tantor

Exceptional

Adventures with Cormack and Amelia! What's not to love?

Making the fantastical seem real is something that Vaughn excels at doing. Another lovely installment. I look forward to many more.

Narration was well done.

Fun caper for those in the know

This wasn’t so much a mystery as a caper. This also wasn’t so much a complete story as an extended escape scene. The world and urban fantasy canon wasn’t detailed, which was fine for me since I’ve listened to the original Kitty Norville series fairly recently. However, for the uninitiated, you might find the story lacking.

Things glossed over in this spinoff series:
-This is a world recently aware of creatures and magic, thanks to a viral video of Kitty shifting to werewolf
-Cormac has a dark past and was quite the antihero (whereas here he’s written pretty white hat tame)
-Kitty, Ben, and Cormac have a lot of history between them
-When the story says Ben blushing is not an easy thing, it helps to know he’s black to understand why

Even the new mermaid thing stayed on the shallow end. Amelia asked a thousand questions about mermaids and almost none were answered. I had a good time listening, but it felt like this would have been better as a full length book, if only the author was willing to make the effort of filing in between the scene, characters, and story lines.

Finally, for a series featuring a guy with a girl in his head, the format begs duet-style narration with a female voice for Amelia. The addition of Kitty Norville into the story could have been the opportunity to bring in that series’s narrator to do Amelia and Kitty.