Naked Dragon is the first in the Works Like Magic series. It’s supposed to be a humorous romance, and it is. Sometimes. More often than not though, it is disjointed and silly. Too bad, because I really was looking forward to this.

Bastian Dragonelli is a former Roman soldier. He and his fellow legionnaires were cursed by Killian, a black magick witch. (I wonder if she was in a previous book…she seems to come out of nowhere). Bastian and the rest of the legion were turned into dragons and exiled onto a bleak world. Finally, Andra, a white magick witch, offered a sliver of hope – one dragon per phase of the moon could be turned back, and naturally, Bastian is the first one.

He ends up as a human, in Salem Massachusetts at the Works like Magick employment agency owned by white witch Vivica Quinlan. Vivica has just the job for him. Her cousin McKenna Greylock needs a handyman. McKenna (of a magickal family, although she is not a practioner) has inherited her grandparents’ large mansion. They had always wanted to turn it into a bed and breakfast and McKenna wants to honor their dream, but the place is a dump. If she can’t get it into shape soon and attract some customers, evil developer Elliot Huntley will get his greedy hands on it.

Enter Bastian. He’s not all that sure of himself in human form, and he blunders into McKenna’s house by breaking the foundation and blundering into the coal bin. She finds him there, face down in the coal bin which gives her the opportunity to ogle his fine butt. After a bit of banter, Vivica shows up and vouches for him, so McKenna hires him as her handyman – a task at which he proves to be fairly skillful since he reads quickly, still has his dragon speed and some of his dragon attributes (hot breath is great for stripping off old paint and wall paper).

Naturally, Bastian and McKenna end up together and her home goes from tumbledown ruin to the hot place to stay with neck snapping speed. It’s all very improbable, but this is a comedy and I can take improbable – but some of the incidents were so darn silly as to make me roll my eyes and sneer. Take McKenna’s cat. She was left in a shoebox at McKenna’s door and ever since then, she has worn a box on her head. Come on! Cats don’t like things on their heads, trust me.

Supporting characters (both human and ghosts) tumble in and out of the plot without being introduced very well. The author has a stylistic quirk, whereby she tends to end chapters with characters about to do something, then the next chapter will begin hours later. A little bit of this is not a big deal, but it seemed to happen every single chapter. It gave the book a very loose, disjointed feel.

As for the characters – I can’t say I disliked them, but I never developed warm feelings for them either. McKenna didn’t strike me as being all there. At one point she decides that Bastian is gay because he puts his hands on the knees of her former contractor who is in a wheelchair. (Bastian is trying to use his healing touch). She seemed to think she can run a business by the seat of her pants (not that she wears pants – McKenna dresses in a neo-hippie earth mother style) and spends a lot of the book doing this and that with no real plan. Thank goodness she has some friends who are more sensible than she is – I get the feeling they will do the bulk of the day-to-day running of the business.

As for Bastian. How can I put this delicately? His, as he puts it, man lance, is dragon-like. It has scales and at one point, McKenna mentions that it looks like a dragon’s tail. Well, I know there’s no accounting for tastes, but a scaled penis is not exactly an erotic image. Bastian himself is a nice enough character, in a beta dragon-like way but there wasn’t much to make him stand out.

I will say one thing, Naked Dragon has an awesome cover and the idea behind it was promising. However, the execution left me vastly underwhelmed.