Fire Raiser by Melanie Rawn

Holly McClure is a small-town girl from Pocahontas County Virginia, but her upbringing was unusual because her entire family is witches. Not only her family, but even some distant relatives are witches or other sorts of Supernatural Practicioners. But Holly isn't a witch most of the time. She's Wiccan, yes, but it's her blood that makes her special. Holly carries a rare talent for Spellbinding. Use her blood in any spell, and it becomes permanent.

Holly, who is a best-selling writer, met her husband, Evan, when the Federal Marshall came to town to solve a case. Now they are married and have two children together, and Holly is worried that she's suffering from writer's block. Normally a novelist, what she's been producing lately is mostly articles, and she's getting rather antsy about it.

Her husband is running for Sherriff of Pocahontas County, and that means suppressing her controversial, wild side, and becoming a political wife. But a fundraising party opens up a large can of worms and sets them all on a wild ride into white slavery and stolen children.

Meanwhile, Holly's brother Cam, a witch who has powers over all sorts of cloth, threads and fabric, has returned home from a career as a lawyer advising political groups around the world. And to his surprise, the town's chief lawyer is Jamey Stirling, the man he had the worst case of the hots for back in college, when they attended together. Cam loved Jamey, but knew that acknowledging their mutual homosexuality wouldn't be good for either career, so he pushed Jamey away. Now that they have met each other again, can he be strong enough to do it again?

Complicating the whole thing is that the Inn where they are meeting is being used as a brothel holding young women. One of them, a very intelligent girl from somewhere in the former Soviet Union, has been the subject of impregnation, and has almost rendered herself autistic to stay sane. She hates Holly, because her reading one of Holly's books let her captor know that she was smart enough to understand English.

But why is she being used for such a purpose, and why is the owner of the inn so anxious to have her baby? What sort of magical hijinks is the hotel being used for, and can all of them survive when they are trapped in the magical corridor connecting the girls prison with a fully-stocked laboratory and a room where the other girls meet their "clients" and are caught in the act on videotape. Can they escape the trap and stay alive while doing it? What's going on in the Inn, and can Holly and Evan bring the perpetrators to justice?

This was another book I found hard to get into, because so many of the story threads go forwards, backwards and then forwards again as each character is shown in the past and now. This bungee-jumping of times is rather distracting, but it does come out being understandable- just. The problem came when this happens for pretty much every new character, from the pregnant girl to Cam and Jamey. I did like the ending, and how Cam and Jamey were allowed to be happy together, and I liked how the author showed how much Evan and Holly were still in love (lots of boot-banging), but it wasn't a series I'd want to read too much more of.

It seemed to me, not having read the first book in the series, that the supporting characters got much more fleshing out than the main characters. We even get to see a rather heavy-handed hint dropped for a future book- I say future, because I didn't see any particular reason why it should have been mentioned here. Once it's mentioned, the whole thing never becomes relevant to this story, except in the most tangential way. Basically, it establishes that children can inherit their parents magical talents. Um, okay. And the clue drops with a heavy "Pthud!", making itself known.

As a story, it was fairly good, but without having read the first, I can honestly say that the two characters who are supposed to be at the heart of the story, Evan and Holly come off as slightly flat compared to the others. And it didn't make me run to look for the original volume either. The story is meaty and rich, and best absorbed in small doses, but not something that makes me burn to read more. Solid and recommended.