BOOK REVIEW ~ Halfway Dead by Terry Maggert

I was introduced to Halfway Dead by the author himself. Terry contacted me on twitter asking if I'd like to review the sequel, Halfway Bitten, and so I borrowed Halfway Dead from Kindle Unlimited. My review for Halfway Bitten will be up next week!

DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads)
Carlie McEwan loves many things. She loves being a witch. She loves her town of Halfway, NY—a tourist destination nestled on the shores of an Adirondack lake. Carlie loves her enormous familiar, Gus, who is twenty-five pounds of judgmental Maine Coon cat, and she positively worships her Grandmother, a witch of incredible power and wisdom. Carlie spends her days cooking at the finest—and only—real diner in town, and her life is a balance between magic and the mundane, just as she likes it. When a blonde stranger sits at the diner counter and calls her by name, that balance is gone. Major Pickford asks Carlie to lead him into the deepest shadows of the forest to find a mythical circle of chestnut trees, thought lost to forever to mankind. There are ghosts in the forest, and one of them cries out to Carlie across the years. Come find me. Danger, like the shadowed pools of the forest, can run deep. The danger is real, but Carlie’s magic is born of a pure spirit. With the help of Gus, and Gran, and a rugged cop who really does want to save the world, she’ll fight to bring a ghost home, and deliver justice to a murderer who hides in the cool, mysterious green of a forest gone mad with magic.

REVIEW:
I always end up doing these in bullet points. It's easier for me to keep my thoughts together like this!

• I was immediately pulled in my the small bit of action at the start of this book.

• I really enjoyed the character developments, a lot of which made me crack up so hard (such as Carlie's parents)

• I really enjoyed the world building, especially being a New Yorker myself (living near Albany). What I would have loved was a little more detail as the where Halfway was in comparison to the lakes.

• I enjoyed that Carlie is a fairly new witch, and is still learning her spells. It was nice to see her learning a bit.

• I liked that Carlie doesn't just use her magic for everything, and has rules to how people request spells from her. It was something different!

• The lore about the place Carlie was asked to find was pretty creepy and interesting, and it only got better as you learned more!

• The storyline definitely got a bit creepy at times (in the "what the heck" way), but I loved that. You couldn't predict what would happen next.

• The humor was definitely a huge plus to me, I was laughing so much at some things

• I did enjoy reading Wulfric's history. It made no sense of why it was added until further in the book, but then I fully understood.

• Bindie the wisp was probably one of my favorite side characters, along with Gus the cat!

• Overall, this was a very good book that left me wanting more. There were a few parts (very few) that I felt might have been unneeded or a tiny bit too slow, but it was an amazing book anyways!

• Overall rating: 4.5/5 stars!

• I will definitely be buying a paperback copy of this ASAP!

Here is where you can find Halfway Dead:
Amazon - Kindle is 99 cents, Paperback is $9.99
Goodreads

Unfortunately, this book is not available on NOOK. Maybe in the future?