(creator: Madelyn Alt)

At first she had been sceptical about "the superstitious world of magic". She was raised a Catholic and had grown up "firmly entrenched in middle-class America, with middle-class values and aspirations (although my mother would be the first to tell you I'm a habitual underachiever)". But "I wasn't such a great Catholic" and, after she starts to hear frightening warning voices, and realises she has "emotional memories" as well as having strange gut feelings about people, she begins to think she is having real supernatural experiences. Well on the way to becoming a witch herself, it appears.

She happily drives around in an old and temperamental VW Bug called Christine, is very conscious that she is almost thirty (although at times she seems to behave more like a young teenager) and is not as slim as she used to be, having "an all too ample backside". She is a bouncy and gossipy character, and a determined questioner (often sounding remarably like a police interrogator) who can look after herself and put up quite a fight if necessary.

Madelyn Alt (1969- ) says that she spends her days toiling away in the mundane world of business and her nights writing tales of the mysterious. She is married and writes from her home, an 1870s-era Victorian in Northeast Indiana, where she lives with her husband and four sons. She explains in her myspace entry "The truth is, I'm just your average, run-of-the-mill small town Midwestern girl who was blessed at birth with an active imagination and a steadfast love for the written word. Writing is one of the best jobs in the world, I must say."

She says that she "loves chocolate, Siamese cats, a shivering-good ghost story, the magic in the world around us, and sometimes, more chocolate." She explains that she has always been intrigued by the paranormal. But she had been writing for 14 years before she managed to get her first book published, the first of the Bewitching Mystery series described below.

The Trouble with Magic (2006)
The Trouble with Magic starts with Maggie O'Neill leaning against a shop door to escape the rain and accidentally falling into what she finds to be an antique shop called Enchantments, run by English expatriate Felicity Dow, who turns out to be a witch - but a friendly benevolent one. "Although I had to admit, with her salon-sleek hair and elegant clothes, Felicity certainly didn't look the part."

Maggie, bored with her office work, is more than happy to accept Felicity's offer of a job. But on Maggie's very first day at Enchantments, Felicity is questioned by the police about the murder of her estranged sister - and later on she is arrested. Maggie, inspired and/or scared by eerie whispers and other strange voices, sets about trying to prove her innocence, going round questioning people - and finding herself attracted by the "masculinity" both of one of the policeman (although she rather oddly describes him as "a cretin") and one of the suspects, and was soon "all but drooling". He turns out to be "a really good kisser". She sounds here more like a silly young teenager than a woman approaching thirty. Eventually she is confronted by the murderer, and has to put up a brisk fight to save her life.

Maggie announces blithely, "I could use a little magic in my life" and, despite her initial reservations, is soon convinced that if she had been prepared to believe in God, "then angels, devils and ghosts weren't too much of a stretch". Not for her, anyway. Especially after she had heard a non-existent dog outside her door, and Felicity had explained to her that "it was a spirit". Later on, Felicity explains more about the ghostly dog: "That was Cecil... Cecil is my family's animal totem. A spirit guardian. When I moved to the States, he followed me." Even Maggie has difficulty in swallowing this one!
"You don't have to believe," Felicity tells her. "They can exist with or without your permission or acknowledgment."

Maggie later confides to her best friend, "The idea that ghosts ... spirits ... whatever you want to call them, walk the earth ... it's a little too much for my poor brain to comprehend at the moment .... What's next? Fairies? Elves? Pixies? Trolls?" She giggled, but "it was a nervous giggle, because from there, it wasn't a huge leap to witches and magic. Real magic. Criminey." Once again she does not sound like a woman of nearly thirty.

Maggie had "the uncanny feeling that she (Felicity) could see straight through me." It is Felicity who tells her, "Most people walk around day by day completely blind to the wonder of the world around them. They refuse to see the signs of the divine in all of creation, in the very patterns of life. If only they would pay attention ..."
"And you study these things?" I asked, trying to make sense of it all.
"With a little help from my friends," she affirmed, and invites Maggie to meet her followers, fellow-witches. It is not a coven, it seems, as Felicity is "a solitary" and practises alone.

Felicity can, of course, do spells but chooses not to. As she explains to Maggie, "Except in the most extreme circumstances, modern-day witches abide by Karmic Law, or the Rule of Three. That, positive or negative, whatever we do returns to us three times as strongly somewhere down the road. We do not believe in manipulating the will of others in most circumstances, because we believe in treating others as we ourselves hope to be treated. And because our will is human and personal, we cannot possibly see the full ramifications of altering the plans the Goddess has set into motion."

The basic plot is not very exciting, although towards the end Maggie feels that "things were coming to a head" and she is warned by a male witch to "Be careful. The veil beween the physical world and the spirit world is thinning as we speak. Darker forces never need much encouragement to try to affect the actions of humans. A thinning veil makes it that much easier for them to accomplish their goals," and he gives her a couple of magic stones, one of which comes in handy when she has to defend herself.

Right at the end, Maggie tells us that "something was awakened that fall, something dark and powerful that in these early stages only sensitives felt ... The scope of evidence the N.I.G.H.T.S. had been quietly amassing .... gave proof we were not alone on this physical plane .... I too had sensed something on the horizon. Something that went beyond the real world and that delved into a shadow world that until then had been hidden to me. Real or imagined? You be the judge." Well, based on the sort of treatment it gets in this book, I'd say imagined.

A Charmed Death (2006)
A Charmed Death tells how Maggie O'Neill witnesses an altercation between a local teenage princess called Amanda Lynn, and another young customer in the Enchantments antique shop, where Maggie has been working for two and a half months. This gets the story off to a good start. Then when Amanda turns up dead, Maggie feels compelled to investigate.

Her interest in the occult leads her to join other members of N.I.G.H.T.S. (Northeast Indiana Ghost Hunting and Tracking Society) in their investigation of a haunted cemetery. Maggie admits to be scared of cemeteries, but Liss (Felicity, her boss) "showed me how to create a personal zone of protection made of pure white light. Built in the mind's eye, it was a defence not easily breached by negative forces." So that's all right, then.

They try chanting and speaking to the supposed ghostly presences - but, despite recording "magnetic field disturbances" and the like, don't seem to get any meaningful answers. Maggie is solemnly told by another member, "You have a giant orb like Evie's. But yours has color. Violet? It's beautiful. huge, swirling with energy!" Unfortunately the author seems to take all this quite seriously.

Maggie had tried her hand at dowsing too. As the old Amish man Eli had told her, she just had to stretch out her arm holding the piece of string with stone attached. "Breathe deep. Watch the stone. When you feel at peace, you ask to speak to your guide."
Maggie frowned. "My spirit guide?"
Eli nodded.
"How do I know I have one?"
"Everybody have one. Some more than one. That little voice in your head that is not yours, ja?"

Later on it is Liss who shows her how to move the pendulum over a dowsing chart in an effort to get direct answers to such questions as what happened to Amanda. But the pendulum "moved back into its powerful back-and-forth motion that indicated a waiting pattern."
"Spirit guide," enquires Maggie, ever hopeful, "can you tell me anything that will help the police find the person who killed her?" It can, it seems, give her no help beyond spelling out the letters C-C-L-K. "Maybe my spirit guide just couldn't spell." reflects Maggie - but then she realises what the letters might mean - and goes haring off to uncover the next clue.

With the aid of further spells, charms, and mystical intuitions, as well as the help of her boss, fellow witch Felicity Dow, she is able to identify the author of scandalous blogs that describe the sexual activities of Amanda and her friends, and she eventually gets to confront the murderer. Then it all ends in the conventional way with her trying to keep the murderer talking while she figures out some way of escape. It's obvious really: just use a bit of magic - and this is what she does.

Maggie herself is a cheeky bouncy character: "That's right, people," she tells the reader, "I'm sensitive to the feelings of others as well as a whole host of other phenomona that sometimes spooked me senseless." She explains later that she had rejected both the Catholic teaching that witches, ghosts and magic "were tools of the Devil and to be avoided at all costs", as well as "the more secular viewpoint as taught in school, that they were nothing more than myths perpetuated by ignorance and fear and human desire ... Hey, a girl can change her mind, can't she?" Yes she can, but the way she describes it makes it all sound more flip than funny.

It's no wonder that Maggie gets round to admitting. "I'm not sure what I believe."
Liss tells her, "The important thing is that you allow yourself the time to discover what your God means to you, without the pressure or demands of outside forces. Listen to your own heart. You know the truth. It's there inside you. Inside each of us. Waiting to be remembered."
Then the author immediately trivialises it all by getting Liss to suggest that they should weave a spell to make Deputy Tom Fielding of the local police department more interested in her.
"Sounds good," says Maggie, sounding more like a schoolgirl than ever. "Do you think it will work?"
"I'd bet my broomstick on it."
Maggie describes how "I opened my mouth as surprise washed over me."
Liss winked. "Just joking. I would never bet my broomstick. How on earth would I get around town?"

Despite these welcome light touches, the plot is not really strong enough to hold the interest throughout, nor is it convincing enough to be taken seriously, or funny enough for this not to matter.

Hex Marks the Spot (2007)
Hex Marks the Spot gets off to quite an interesting start. Maggie O'Neill accompanies her boss and fellow witch, Felicity Dow, to a countrywide craft bazaar. This is amusingly described: there were all "the predictable 'kuntry' crafts so many found charming these days. Cows, chickens, gingham, too many items decorated with that watered-down and ubiquitous blue that had been popular for at least a decade ... Even miniature two-seat privies for the country girls who had everything. And then there was the proliferation of bunnies of all shapes and sizes, phony eggs, and baskets with pastel grass, proudly displayed side by side with the crosses adorned with plastic Jesus figures, just in time for the upcoming holiday."

Felicity falls for a handsome armoire (shown on the book cover), intricately carved by an Amish craftsman, Lucas Metzger. Maggie notices that this craftsman, Luc, is "an angelic vision ... all golden hair, twinkling eyes, and ruddy, sensual lips", and all the ladies have their eyes on him.When he turns up dead, with a strange hex symbol etched near his corpse, Maggie feels it is up to her to investigate further. It is, in fact, her third murder investigation in just seven months.

At first all this is quite entertaining with, at first, a merciful lack of too many over-the top occult experiences. Of course, she still feels faint from some spirit energy "running just below the surface of reality on the underpinnings of the astral tide," but perhaps you could put that down to nerves. Or was the dead Luc still hanging around with something to tell her? Marion, the local librarian, is convinced that there is at least one ghost (called Boiler Room Bertie!) haunting her premises but mercifully they have got used to him and so he is only a minor problem.

Maggie remains attracted both by policeman Tom, now promoted to be Special Task Force Investigator, and by fellow witch Marcus. But she does not yet seem sure enough to commit herself to either of them. She is not sure about her religious beliefs either ("the jury was still out on that," she says), but can at least joke about the time when a mystic dark shape ("a big furry something") hurled itself at her in the dark, "opened its white-toothed maw .... and ... licked my chin." It turned out to be an over-affectionate dog. This works fine.

What is quite unconvincing is when the author tries to go all serious, as in the grand climax, when the murderer's "lips pulled back over her teeth in a primal snarl. Her face contorted. Flattened, I saw a shift, as though another face was superrimposed over the top of hers, the features merging so that you couldn't tell where one started and the other stopped." A sort of poor woman's Picture of Dorian Gray, in fact. But the Wilde story was really terifying.

Maggie still remains remarkably immature for someone approaching thirty, and at one stage even tells us she is annoyed and feels "a pout coming on. I hated that. Pouts were for little girls, not grown women trying like hell to believe in themselves." But then Tom suddenly kisses her, "Heat, pure and primal, poured through my veins ... The only thing that was important was this moment, this man, and this wonderful, fluid warmth." Then off home he went.

Not long after after, she is being kissed by Marcus: "I was .... busy enjoying the feel of Marcus' body crushing mine against the door. His hands were splayed on either side of me, flat against the planes of the door itself, as though he didn't trust himself to let them roam free. It didn't seem to matter, though - he was more than making up for it with the rest of him. As for me, at some point in time I'd wound my arms tight around his neck, and I was clinging to him like a drowning soul." And off home he goes too.

By next morning "the guilt that had settled in the night before had managed to magnify tenfold. I was pond scum. Worse than pond scum .... I had nearly betrayed the trust of a most beloved friend (Tom)." Any humor here seems entirely unintentional.

So she has quite a busy time. But, even though the plot is slow to unwind, and there is little really exciting action, there are some nice light-hearted moments and this is the most entertaining of the books so far.

The author has her own attractively designed little website - but at the time of writing many of the links were not working! She also has her profile on myspace.

Her books are readily available, new or used. A good source of used books is abebooks. They feature the stock of 13,000 booksellers from all over the world, and I have always found them to be very reliable.

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