A Demon and His Witch by Eve Langlais

🎃 Read for the Unapologetic Romance Readers Halloween 2017 Reading Challenge for the category of: a romance with a demon 🎃

I needed a romance novel about a demon for a reading challenge, and this book was free (this is becoming a familiar refrain from me). The summary sounded intriguing but it had one of those horrible cartoony covers (not pictured here), and I always side-eye my acquisitions from the freebie section because while I have unearthed some gems there, there's also a lot of garbage.

At first, I really enjoyed the childish banter and gossipy writing style. It kind of reminded me of Katie MacAlister before her writing got kind of bad, or the middle Stephanie Plum novels when they were formulaic and cheesy but still good.

Ysabel is a witch who was burned at the stake 500 years ago when she got too inconvenient for her lover to have around. She cursed him, his mother, and three other villagers who were responsible for her death with her last dying breath - only she didn't read the fine print of that spell. Now, she's doomed to serve as Lucifer's assistant in the afterlife and he wants her on a special assignment: those 5 humans who killed her have escaped, and she's going to relive the final moments of her death in increasing increments of time every day that they remain at large.

Remy is the half-demon assigned by Lucifer to help him, and he's basically a walking sexual harassment poster. Remember the heroes of the early 2000s, the hyper-sexualized ones who acted like frat boy rejects and thought "no" was just a "yes" in the rough? Remy is cast in that mold, so much so that I actually checked the book's publication date to see if it was a 2002 release, or something like that. But no, this came out in 2012.

Despite his grating personality, I really liked the premise and the chemistry between them was somewhat well done, so I thought I might be able to overlook that element of sleaze. I sat on a three-star rating for this book until the 50% mark, when I realized that the sexist comments were going to keep coming and Remy was going to let his alpha flag fly, saying things like, how he wished he could have her walk around panty-less but oh, then the demons who lived in the sewers might see her crotch when she was walking around and that crotch belonged to him... but oh, then he could just kill all the demons who lived in the sewers in a massive act of genocide so she could be panty-less and remain his alone! Ha ha! A winner is he! And Ysabel, she eats this up, hook, line, and sinker, after some token resistance, because Remy likes women who say "no" because he sees it as a "challenge."

Ew.

Also, at the end we find out that Lucifer secretly orchestrated this to play matchmaker because he wants to breed more inhabitants of hell. Double ew @ infernal breeding programs.

2 to 2.5 out of 5 stars