BEWITCHED is the first in a new series by the same name from paranormal romance author Laura Thalassa.  Thalassa has a deft hand with antiheroes, which is a trope I adore.  I really enjoyed her series of The Four Horsemen.  Anyone who can make the four horsemen of the apocalypse into sympathetic and sexy characters will catch my eye, that's for certain.  Thalassa employs that same skill here to make a brutal two-thousand-year-old ruler into a seductive and desirable man, and I am here for it!   Selene is a young witch who came into her powers three years ago.  She's been trying repeatedly to gain admission to the Henbane Coven, an academy that her best friend already attends.  Selene is told at her latest admissions interview that if she goes on a better spirit quest and comes back with a familiar too, she will finally gain the academy admission that she keeps trying for.  Plucky Selene is so enjoyable and easy to root for!  The curse of Selene's power is that when she does magic, she pays for it by losing some of her memories.  Selene keeps reams of notebooks and oodles of sticky notes everywhere to try to compensate for her loss of memories, and it is really endearing.   Selene accidentally awakens an ancient curse being while she is on her quest in South America after her plane goes down in the rainforest.  The dude she wakes is an ancient evil, Memnon the Cursed, who mistakes Selene for his long-dead wife.  And he says that his wife betrayed him and cursed him to remain trapped underground forever in that rainforest.  Whoa, this is heady stuff!  Selene manages to escape and head back to her beloved academy, but then her fellow witches start to be murdered, and Selen can't help but wonder if the evil nut job that she inadvertently released is responsible.  What a great setup!!  This story sucked me in and kept me at the edge of my seat throughout.   Memnon makes a marvelous antihero, and Selene is such a sympathetic character too.  The worldbuilding is engaging, and there is a lot of action to move the story along at a great clip.  I can't wait to see where Thalassa goes next with this series, and think with this new book this author has achieved auto-buy status with me.   Thalassa's BEWITCHED brings an oddly endearing and sexy awakened evil and an innocent witch together, with action and sexytimes galore.