This is book eight of the A Witch in Time series and the main character is witch Nuala Walsh, who is about to give birth to twins, but has yet to tell her husband the secret about what she really is, because of the whole no telling humans about magic. She thought she would have more time, but the babies put in an arrival during her baby shower with her fellow witchy friends and Seth arrives home just in time to see one of the witches using magic, which shocks him more than Nuala going into labour. She has her twins, which they name Emma and Oliver, and she knows only females in her line have the possibility of magic, so she will have to figure out how to let Oliver know about that and not feel left out. While she has been on maternity leave, she hasn’t been taking any jobs from the Agency of Paranormal Peculiarities (APP), wanting to wait until the twins are a bit older. She and Seth also run their own gym, so she has a lot on her plate already, with the twins now only six months old.
Her magic lends itself to strong empath powers and she uses these to help solve cases the APP give her and she is one of the handful of five time travelling witches who work on cold cases with a paranormal twist, travelling back in time to solve crimes. The case that has appeared at her home, is that of a missing Faberge egg, which blessed the women of the Devereux family with good fortune, from the time of the grandmother Babs and her husband arrived on a boat from overseas, looking for a better life. Babs has the ‘sight’ and gets some fuzzy visions of events and has used this to make her family successful, as well as the egg which she believes has a magic spell placed on it to give them all good fortune down the female family line. The only clues Nuala has are a small article in an old newspaper about the change in fortunes of the family and who was now left of the line. She needs to travel back to 1994 and become the companion to someone in the Devereux home, expecting it to one of the two daughters, but ends up becoming the companion to the grandmother of the family, Babs.
The egg disappeared a few days before, when Babs insisted it was taken out of the safe for a family portrait being done and it went missing, but the family don’t want the police called. The daughter Riley is a bit of a workaholic and not much of a mother to her two daughters, teenager Penny and nine year old Barbara, both of which who are supposedly sperm donor babies! Babs’ son Noah has also been called back to the family home and all the staff let go, except for Hattie, who does just about everything and has been with the family for decades. The family is a very dysfunctional one, with Barbara having a room of creepy dolls she plays with and talks to, a moody teen with a few secrets of her own and their mother Riley who has far more secrets than anyone else it seems. Riley has hired an investigator, who turns out to be more of a family hanger on, Christopher, who doesn’t know how to run an investigation if it bit him in the face. Noah has never worked, seemingly taking the money the women of the family give him and living a life of a playboy with his toys!
The matriarch of the family has a huge say on how her daughter and granddaughters live, but doesn’t have much of a relationship with her son. There are far too many secrets and lies between them all, with motives for action that would split the family further apart rather than solve the mystery of the egg or even get them to realise how damaging their behaviour towards each other is to the youngest of the family. With the magical egg missing, the family is already being affected and their luck is changing! Nuala hasn’t got a murder or some serious crime to solve and she thought she could manage to leave behind her little babies and husband, to solve a simple stolen item, but this case is far more complex than she realised and the Cosmos won’t let her return to her family until she achieves what she has been sent to do. She is the only hope for the Devereux family and she knows that if it isn’t sorted satisfactorily, then time will run out for the family and their fate will be what the future reported. She wants to get back to her babies, her family, especially after seeing how one dysfunctional family are wasting the time they have together! Each of the stories in the series can be read as a standalone and covers a different witch with a time travelling cold case to solve. A little touch of magic and lots of common sense. I received an ARC copy of this book from BookSprout and I have freely given my own opinion of the book above.