I received a free copy of this book to review by Netgalley, on behalf of the publishers.
Mia Marshall’s Broken Elements is the opening novel in a series about people able to control elements like water, fire, ice, and so on. Our protagonist is young Aidan Brook, who is surprised when an old college friend tracks her down and tells her that the murders they thought they had stopped a decade before have started up again. Ten years before the novel opens, Aiden and Sera thought they had killed the killer by burning down a building around him. After that, Aidan had retreated to a remote house in Oregon and lived as a hermit. Sera drags a reluctant Aidan back into the hunt when Sera’s boyfriend is murdered. Sera also assembles a team of other alumni and supernatural beings to investigate, as the killer is using magical means to dispatch his victims. Sera knows that the regular authorities will never figure it out, so it’s up to them to find out if, perhaps, the killer escaped or if another person is a copycat.
Marshall throws in some useful exposition about Aidan’s world and magic, without bogging down the story, and introduces a love interest for the former hermit. What does bog down the story is Aidan worrying, for little reason, about her mental state. It’s not clear to me why she thinks she’s going crazy. To my way of thinking, Aidan is suffering from some justifiable post-traumatic stress and depression–nothing some therapy wouldn’t help with. It’s only later in the story that this whole going crazy thing starts to make sense, but that only happens after Marshall starts to throw in some major twists. Aidan’s worries, in that light, actually read more like retrofitted plot than anything else.
Other than this somewhat major quibble, Broken Elements was an interesting read and reasonably entertaining. I don’t know if I’ll follow the series though. Aidan is a hard character to bond with, as we’re so often told what she’s feeling rather than shown. Without that bond, only simple curiosity got me through the book.