Haunted was one of those books that I breezed through even as I recognized that it wasn’t particularly good. The first in Lisa Childs’s new trilogy Witch Hunt, it’s a more engaging book than the other Silhouette Nocturnes I’ve tried. It also suffers from a number of weaknesses that prevent it from being a satisfying read.

When Ariel Cooper was a girl, her mother told her and her two sisters about their family legacy. They are witches, blessed with special abilities, but cursed to be persecuted for them. For centuries the women in their family have been hunted and killed. On the night her mother told them the story, Ariel and her sisters were taken away by social workers and separated. Ariel never saw them again.

As she grew up, she became familiar with her ability to see the souls of the dead, but also the rejection that came with admitting this power to anyone else. More than once she was abandoned by someone she loved who decided she must be crazy for thinking she could see dead people. As the book begins, she’s several months into a new relationship with software developer David Koster. She’s afraid to tell him about her power. Then she sees the spirit of her long-lost mother and realizes she must now be dead. Ariel and her sisters could be next unless she finds them – and the killer – before it’s too late.

I’ve read several books by Lisa Childs, and in my experience she’s one of those authors whose prose isn’t particularly sharp or elegant, but it gets the job done. There’s a certain quality to her writing that makes it eminently readable even if she won’t win many style points. That was true again here, which immediately put it ahead of several of the other Nocturnes I’ve read (or tried to read). Childs writes with enough emotion to draw readers into the story and hold our attention. The opening scene depicts that long-ago night centuries earlier when an angry mob came after the first witch in their family, with her daughter narrowly escaping the same fate, then quickly moves forward to the night Ariel’s mother told her daughters about their legacy as the social workers descended on their door. From that gripping opening, the book had me and for the most part kept me reading straight through to the end. This was particularly impressive since the pacing is wildly uneven and the story has a number of problems.

The largest one is that the characters are drawn in broad strokes with little depth. Ariel at least is a sympathetic heroine because most of the book is viewed through her perspective. As someone who has been rejected and scorned, she’s easy to empathize with as she struggles to find her long-lost family. On the other hand, none of the story is seen from David’s point-of-view, and he comes across as little more than a stick figure. I suspect what the author is trying to do is keep him mysterious to make the reader suspect him of being the crazed killer trying to kill Ariel and her sisters (several scenes are seen from this person’s P.O.V.). Of course, this is a romance novel, most readers are going to assume the hero is not the crazed killer trying to murder the heroine, and it’s going to take some pretty heavy lifting to make us think otherwise. Some gothic authors are able to do it. Childs doesn’t come close. David doesn’t seem mysterious. He just seems vacant, despite the typical traumatic backstory the author slathers on rather sloppily.

In the end, not only was it not convincing that he could be the bad guy, but he was so thinly developed as a result that it was impossible to care about him or the love story. The romance never really works. It begins several months into the characters’ relationship with them already supposedly in love, and from the beginning, the author tells us about their feelings without showing them. This continues throughout the story, as David proposes to Ariel and she wavers about accepting and telling him the truth about her power. The author keeps telling the reader about the relationship without drawing us into it or giving us a reason to care about it. And the villain is your run-of-the-mill over-the-top crazy.

I should also note that some readers may find the ending less than fully satisfying. This is one of those books that doesn’t entirely stand on its own, setting up a storyline that will be continued in the next two books. The romance is resolved, but little else is. Readers who don’t care for that kind of open-ended tactic should consider themselves warned. Personally, it bothered me less than it usually does, but didn’t raise my impression of the book either.

To be honest, after I turned the last page, I wasn’t sure I cared enough to pick up the next book, which basically sums up my impression of this one. Haunted is a fast, easy read that didn’t leave me feeling like I wasted my time or money, but ultimately nothing special.