When most people think of urban fantasy, authors like Faith Hunter, Seanan McGuire and Patricia Briggs come to mind. Claire Humphrey's debut novel, SPELLS OF BLOOD AND KIN, most closely associates with urban fantasy but doesn't resemble the aforementioned authors. Magic, witches and paranormal creatures make appearances in Humphrey's tale but not in a traditional manner, and the story moves at a slower pace.

Lissa Nevsky's grandmother, or Baba as she's known, has died of a sudden heart attack, elevating Lissa to the position of koldun'ia or sorcerer, to her local Russian neighborhood in Toronto. In this story, spells are cast by creating a mixture and painting it onto the shells of raw eggs. The spells take effect when consumed raw, ideally in a milkshake.

Lissa runs into a bigger problem when Maksim Volkov seeks her help. Lissa learns from a conversation with her dead grandmother—that gets explained—that Maksim is kin and should be assisted. Lissa misunderstands kin to mean family rather than an immortal paranormal creature who has a need for violence that is difficult to keep leashed. The closest association I can come up with from past reading is a berserker.

Maksim accidentally infects a college student, Nick, by licking a wound on his forehead. He asks Lissa to help him better contain his rage and track down Nick to prevent him from hurting someone.

This likely sounds complicated and confusing. And it is...a bit. The story is told from all three perspectives. Humphrey is a talented writer and her descriptions are lively, but it takes too long for things to happen, and her characters never really grabbed my attention. Also, I don't mind violence in stories at all, but some of the ways the kin relieve their rages is to beat up on each other, which doesn't do anything for me. I'm a huge sports fan, but boxing doesn't appeal.

I wish Humphrey had given some context for how the kin came into being or at least given them some kind of context. Much of the book focuses on the relationships among the characters: between Maksim and Lissa; Lissa and her grandmother; Maksim and Augusta, a woman he infected more than 100 years ago. Lissa starts out as a shy and very unlikeable character, but she learns to build better relationships with people once out from under her grandmother's tutelage. Often times I pick books by their titles, and this one had such promise, but I can't say that it lived up to the interesting premise.