A woman who runs a cat rescue in 1920s Montreal turns to a grouchy but charming wizard to help save the shelter in this heartwarming cozy fantasy from the New York Times bestselling author of the Emily Wilde series.
Agnes Aubert leads a meticulously organized life—and she likes it that way. As the proudly type-A manager of a much-needed cat rescue charity, she has devoted her life to finding forever homes for lost cats.
But after she is forced to move the cat shelter, Agnes learns that her new landlord is using her charity as a front—for an internationally renowned and thoroughly disreputable magic shop. Owned by the disorganized—not to mention self-absorbed, irritating, but also decidedly handsome—Havelock Renard, magician and failed Dark Lord, the shop draws magical clientele from around the world, partly due to the quality of Havelock’s illicit goods as well as their curiosity about his shadowy past and rumors of his incredible powers. Agnes's charity offers the perfect cover for illegal magics.
Agnes couldn’t care less about the shop—magical intrigue or not, there are cats to be rescued. But when an enemy from Havelock’s past surfaces, the magic shop—and more importantly, the cat shelter—are suddenly in jeopardy. To save the shelter, will Agnes have to set aside her social conscience and protect the man who once tried to bring about the apocalypse—and is now trying to steal her heart?

My Review: 

The wizard Havelock Renard is about as charming as the feral cats that Agnes Aubert rescues and socializes in her initially not mystical at all cat shelter. It’s a good thing that she’s so good at that particular job, as the wizard the newspapers have dubbed ‘Witch King’ isn’t exactly fit for polite company when this story begins.

Then again, in the beginning, Renard is deliberately hiding himself away in his underground shop, because he’s not really interested in ANY company, polite or otherwise.

However, Agnes’ sunshine can’t help but shine on Renard’s anti-social grumpiness, whether either of them wants it to or not. Because Agnes’ charity cat shelter has just moved into the street-level of Renard’s underground magical shop. Their shops need each other, even if the humans are very much at cross purposes.

Or in Renard’s case, just plain cross.

The rent is cheap, so cheap that Agnes can afford it, however barely. Her charitable enterprise is much better at finding cats to rescue than it is at inducing humans to come in and adopt them. Her previous accommodations have had a hole blasted in the wall, courtesy of some out of control wizards. Possibly including Renard himself – or so rumor has it.

Renard needs a street-level shop to hide the presence of his own place underneath it. But the location has a reputation even without Renard’s presence being known, because HIS clientele is just a bit uncanny – and magic leaks.

Strange things happen on those premises, but Agnes can’t afford to be picky. Montreal’s winter is already descending upon the city, and neither she nor the cats can survive without shelter – a shelter that needs to have all four walls and the roof completely intact.

Agnes has come to accept the strange customers who wander through her shop and disappear, and the mysterious but delicious aromas of baking that still emanate from the stone oven even though no baker has baked in that oven for several years. She has an inkling that someone or something magical is hiding somewhere on the premises, but it’s only when a rogue wizard, NOT Havelock Renard but his sister Valérie, arrives at her shop and starts battering the walls down with magic – exactly like what happened at her previous location – that her suspicions are confirmed when Havelock Renard not only appears, but moves the entire building, along with all of its human AND feline inhabitants, into an entirely different location several blocks away.

By magic. Not “as if by magic” but by actual magic.

It is NOT an auspicious meeting for Agnes, Renard, or the cats. But it’s also not their first meeting, a meeting which was, literally and figuratively, magical. So magical that none of them remember it. Because they won’t remember until they NEED to. Because…magic.

Escape Rating A: Agnes Aubert operates a charitable cat rescue. Stories don’t get much cozier than that, whether the world the cat shelter is in is magical or not. So I came into this expecting a whole lot of cozy and an indeterminate amount of magic – and that’s exactly what I got.

(I also felt the chill of a Montreal winter, which I did not necessarily want. But it did make for an excellent reason to read this one with a couple of cats on my lap. Just to get into the spirit of the thing. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)

The thing about cozy fantasy, which is definitely the branch of cozy that this is in, is that it can go multiple ways, both in regards to the coziness of the setting and to the amount of magic operating within. The magic in Agnes’ 1920s Montreal is of the secret, hidden and generally dangerous kind. The secret world of magic, the doors it opens to dangerous places, and the sheer number of ways that non-magic-users can destroy themselves and others by playing with things they don’t understand, reminds me a lot of the hidden magical societies in The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door by H.G. Parry and Freya Marske’s The Last Binding series.

As in both of those stories, the magic system in this Montreal is dangerous. Or rather, a lot of the people who use it are dangerous, and all too frequently in the sense of power corrupting. Both because it’s taught through an apprenticeship system, and because knowledge gets lost over the centuries as it’s passed down, parsed out, or not passed on at all out of either spite or hubris. But also because ordinary people can’t DO anything about a mischievous wizard who is just itching to find out how much fun they can have in a public place by literally playing with fire.

The jury of public opinion is still out on Havelock Renard when this book opens as to just what kind of wizard he is, civic minded or practicing to be the next ‘Dark Lord’. Once she gets to know him, Agnes has no doubts about his real motives. After all, the cats seem to like him – whether he likes them or not.

This isn’t IN a fantasy location like Legends & Lattes or Adenashire, it’s our world with magic layered on top. Or generally, as events in this story show, hidden underneath. Making this story a bit different from the usual run of cozy fantasy. Speaking of different, Montreal is not one of the usual suspects for the setting of a fantasy, cozy or otherwise, making this story a bit of a treat, much like the magical baked goods that mysteriously appear in the oven every midnight – and only at midnight.

There’s also a bit of a twist to the grumpy/sunshine romance between Agnes and Renard. He’s all the grumpiness, all the time. He’s allergic to cats, he’s even more allergic to keeping track of his papers and his magical artifacts, he’s misanthropic to the nth degree, and he was raised by wolves. Not quite literally that last bit, but considering that his sister raised him and she’s now doing her damndest to raze any roof he rests under, there’s more truth to that than one would initially imagine.

What makes Renard and Agnes EVENTUALLY make sense as a couple is that her sunshine is hard won, and that there are plenty of rain clouds on its horizon. She’s optimistic and believes the best of everyone and everything not because she’s either stupid or naive, but because she’d rather believe the best of someone and occasionally get disappointed than believe the worst and be continually miserable. She’s dealing with enough real misery after losing her beloved husband to a heart attack before he turned THIRTY. Her life is difficult enough without starting out each day with EXTRA negativity. Her plate is already full – even when she doesn’t have enough to feed either herself or her cats.

Because this is fantasy, there is, indeed, an epic and climactic battle to bring all the threads – and all the brightly lit spider webs – to an appropriately epic conclusion. Howsomever, as this is a cozy fantasy and not an epic fantasy, it’s not one of those huge epic battlefields to decide whether good or evil wins the day. Instead, the contest – which is still a nail biter – is about hope and fear and obsession and madness, and it’s about the restoration of a family that has been broken, even as it clears the way for a new family to begin.

This is one that I finished with a cat in my lap and a smile on my face. It managed to be very, very cozy but still end in a high-stakes battle that had real consequences for the characters AND managed to knit together all the open questions into a satisfying and happy with just the right tough of grumpy ending.

In other words, this story is cozy and sweet but with a touch of bitter, but never, ever saccharine, and that turned out to be just the right taste for this reader. I think I’m going to go back and give the author’s Emily Wilde series another try, because Agnes Aubert and her cats turned out to be charming reading companions, just like my own cats.