Review: Haunt

Haunt by Christina Maraziotis
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

1.5 stars 

I received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. 

How she wished she had asked for his name, as no one had ever saved her life before---no one would ever have cared to either. 

H(a)unt is the first book in the Loveletting series that follows a twenty-six year old woman named Charlotte. Born to a sex worker in the late 1800s wild west, Charlotte never knew her father, learned men only want one thing, and had a tough mother. When her mother is murdered, Charlotte decides to take off with her only friend in the world, her horse Finn to the West Rockies. Riding through a town, a man gets thrown out of a saloon and spooks her horse, they lock eyes but the tall man in black with blue eyes rides away. Charlotte later learns from a Wanted poster that it was the infamous Mac Kinnon, wanted for over a decade for numerous murders. A sheriff obsessed with catching Mac, enlists Charlotte to help draw Mac out and from there Charlotte is drawn into danger, adventures, and romances. 

“Ain't no Lord out there, princess.” he finally said, and she froze upon his remark. 

A book of over seven hundred pages, this was written in a lyrical and poetic style that at times made it a little hard to stick with. I liked the beginning of Charlotte starting off in the west alone and then meeting up with a notorious wanted man but the story started to utilize a rinse and repeat formula that started to get exhausting. Charlotte gets saved from a rape by Mac and they both think about how they are drawn to the other but Charlotte then meets another man, Will, who is a rich “elite” and ridiculously talked with some kind of chivalrous knight of old parlance, calling Charlotte “my lady”. The story then gives us a love triangle and Charlotte thinks she is in love with Will but can't get Mac out of her mind, Will loves Charlotte but has some kind of secret, and Mac thinks he isn't good enough for Charlotte. 

She hardly knew him, yet she craved to know more of him. 

While our characters are running, falling in love, Mac saving Charlotte from a grizzly, and generally be-bopping around, there would sometimes be flashbacks and inside a character's head passages. The flashbacks were to tell Mac's backstory, he was an orphan who was adopted by a mentally, physically, and sexually abusive farmer who claimed to be a man of God. They worked to show how and why Mac has become the man he is today. The passages that came from inside a character's head, didn't work as well for me, there was some working out who it was supposed to be in the beginning. The passages would follow a man committing murders from almost a trance or outside himself. The “serial killer” aspect didn't really work for me and that was the only part of the story I felt could come even close to giving this a “horror” tag. 

One was a cold-blooded murderer that pretended to care about her, or rather took pride in rescuing helpless women in all his heroic ways, then disappearing like a phantom into thin air; and the other---a one-of-a-kind gentleman that any woman would give anything for, yet, carrying a deep secret within him. 

Charlotte is mostly who we follow but there were numerous povs from other characters to give a wide look at the world. Later in the book, Will's secret becomes known and he has to leave Charlotte to deal with it. Charlotte then meets a bounty hunter on Mac's trail named Levi and our love triangle becomes a square. Will has his own adventure and we then go back and forth showing Charlotte with Levi and Mac. It eventually all comes to ahead with Mac, Charlotte, the obsessed sheriff, and Levi. As this is book one in a series, the ending is not final and Charlotte has more adventures ahead of her. 

“There lies kindness within your hear, Mac Kinnon. Ya just don't know it yet.” 

I wouldn't read this for the horror and while there is romance in it, it wouldn't be considered romance genre as the ending doesn't give an HEA or HFN. I lost a lot steam to keep reading the story around page three hundred, was briefly awakened when out of nowhere, inbred hillbillies made an appearance, and then tired of the rinse and repeat of Charlotte feeling drawn to Mac but getting entranced with kisses with first Will and then Levi; the story felt like a drawn out trip to see if Charlotte could hang on to her virginity and/or who she would “give” it to. SPOILER Charlotte gets rapped by Levi towards the end.END SPOILER There was some interesting story here but the overly descriptive, lyrical prose cloyed it up, Will's character honestly felt like a waste of time, too many character's “soughing” too many times, emotions/characters felt overly immature, and the ending felt more disappointing than emotional SPOILER Mac dies END SPOILER and didn't really leave me itching to continue Charlotte's story.

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