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Hexed: Book Two of The Iron Druid Chronicles by [Kevin Hearne]

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Kevin Hearne

Hexed: Book Two of The Iron Druid Chronicles Kindle Edition

by Kevin Hearne (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

1,548 ratings

Book 2 of 9: Iron Druid Chronicles

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In the second novel in the New York Times bestselling Iron Druid Chronicles, two thousand-year-old Druid Atticus O’Sullivan faces off against witches, Bacchants, and a ravenous fallen angel.

“A page-turning and often laugh-out-loud-funny caper through a mix of the modern and the mythic.”—Ari Marmell, author of The Warlord’s Legacy

Atticus O’Sullivan has had cause to mistrust witches in his storied past, but he’s willing to live and let live with the Sisters of the Three Auroras, a legendary local coven, even going so far as to sign a non-aggression treaty with them. But that treaty is tested immediately when a deadly new coven sweeps into town seeking to take over, along with some Bacchants from Las Vegas and a fallen angel who’s decided to snack on high school students like they were trail mix.

It’s more than Atticus can handle alone and he must enlist the trickster Coyote, the headhopping abilities of the witch Laksha Kulesekaran, and his neighbor’s illegal arsenal if he wants to keep the city safe from diabolical takeover. He must also exchange favors with his vampire attorney, Leif Helgarson, in a deal that might prove to be the worst of his long life—for Leif doesn’t want to be paid by the hour.

To defeat the mortal hexes of this new coven and keep his apprentice—and his city—safe, Atticus must think fast, make promises, keep his sword handy, and hope he’ll survive to fight another day.

Don’t miss any of Kevin Hearne’s phenomenal Iron Druid Chronicles novels:
HOUNDED | HEXED | HAMMERED | TRICKED | TRAPPED | HUNTED | SHATTERED | STAKED

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317 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Del Rey
Publication date

June 7, 2011
File size

3925 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A page-turning and often laugh-out-loud-funny caper through a mix of the modern and the mythic.”—Ari Marmell, author of The Warlord’s Legacy

“Kevin Hearne breathes new life into old myths, creating a world both eerily familiar and startlingly original.”—Nicole Peeler, author of Tempest Rising

“A witty new fantasy series.”—Kelly Meding, author of Three Days to Dead

About the Author

Kevin Hearne is a middle-aged nerd who still enjoys his comic books and old-school heavy metal. He cooks tasty omelets, hugs trees, and paints miniature army dudes. He lives with his wife, daughter, and doggies in a wee cottage.

Review

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Turns out that when you kill a god, people want to talk to you. Paranormal insurance salesmen with special “godslayer” term life policies. Charlatans with “god-proof” armor and extraplanar safe houses for rent. But, most notably, other gods, who want to first congratulate you on your achievement, second warn you not to try such shenanigans on them, and finally suggest that you try to slay one of their rivals—purely as a shenanigan, of course.

Ever since word got around to the various pantheons that I had snuffed not one but two of the Tuatha Dé Danann—and sent the more powerful of the two to the Christian hell—I had been visited by various potentates, heralds, and ambassadors from most of the world’s belief systems. All of them wanted me to leave them alone but pick a fight with someone else, and if I successfully lanced the immortal boil that vexed them, I’d be rewarded beyond my wildest dreams, blah blah barf yak.

That reward business was a giant load of shite, as they’d say in the U.K. Brighid, Celtic goddess of poetry, fire, and the forge, had promised to reward me if I killed Aenghus Óg, but I hadn’t heard a word from her in the three weeks since Death carried him off to hell. I’d heard plenty from the rest of the world’s gods, but from my own? Nothing but the chirping of crickets.

The Japanese wanted me to mess with the Chinese, and vice versa. The old Russian gods wanted me to stick it to the Hungarians. The Greeks wanted me to knock off their Roman copycats in a bizarre manifestation of self-loathing and internecine jealousy. The weirdest by far were those Easter Island guys, who wanted me to mess around with some rotting totem poles in the Seattle area. But everyone—at least, it sure seemed like everyone—wanted me to slay Thor as soon as I had a free moment. The whole world was tired of his shenanigans, I guess.

Foremost among these was my own attorney, Leif Helgarson. He was an old Icelandic vampire who had presumably worshipped Thor at some point in ancient history, but he’d never told me why he now harbored such hatred for him. Leif did some legal work for me, sparred with me regularly to keep my sword arm sharp, and occasionally drank a goblet full of my blood by way of payment.

I found him waiting for me on my porch the night after Samhain. It was a cool evening in Tempe, and I was in a good mood after having much to give thanks for. While the American children had busied themselves the night before by trick-or-treating on Halloween, I had paid plenty of attention to the Morrigan and Brighid in my own private ceremonies, and I was thrilled to have an apprentice to teach and to share the night with. Granuaile had returned from North Carolina in time for Samhain, and though the two of us were not much of a Druid’s grove, it was still a better holy night than I had enjoyed in centuries. I was the only real Druid left, and the idea of starting a new grove after such a long time of going it alone had filled me with hope. So when Leif greeted me formally from my front porch as I came home from work, I was perhaps more exuberant in my response than I should have been.

“Leif, you spooky bastard, how the hell are ya?” I grinned widely as I braked my bike to a stop. He raised his eyebrows and peered at me down his long Nordic nose, and I realized that he was probably unused to such cavalier address.

“I am not a bastard,” he replied archly. “Spooky I will grant you. And while I am well”—a corner of his mouth quirked upward a fraction—“I confess not so jocund as yourself.”

“Jocund?” I raised my brows. Leif had asked me in the past to call him on behaviors that broadcast how much older he was than he looked.

Apparently he didn’t want to be corrected right then. He exhaled noisily to express his exasperation. I thought it amusing that he employed that, since he had no need to breathe. “Fine,” he said. “Not so jovial, then.”

“No one uses those words anymore, Leif, except for old farts like us.” I leaned my bike against the porch rails and mounted the three steps to take a seat next to him. “You really should spend some decent time learning how to blend in. Make it a project. Popular culture is mutating at a much faster rate these days. It’s not like the Middle Ages, when you had the Church and the aristocracy keeping everything nice and stagnant.”

“Very well, since you are the verbal acrobat who walks the tightrope of the zeitgeist, educate me. How should I have responded?”

“First, get rid of ‘well.’ Nobody uses that anymore either. Now they always say, ‘I’m good.’ ”

Leif frowned. “But that is grammatically improper.”

“These people don’t care about proper. You can tell them they’re trying to use an adjective as an adverb and they’ll just stare at you like you’re a toad.”

“Their educational system has suffered serious setbacks, I see.”

“Tell me about it. So what you should have said was, ‘I’m not stoked like you, Atticus, but I’m chill.’ ”

“I’m ‘chill’? That means I am well—or good, as you say?”

“Correct.”
“But that’s nonsense!” Leif protested.

“It’s modern vernacular.” I shrugged. “Date yourself if you want, but if you keep using nineteenth-century diction, people will start to think you’re a spooky bastard.”

“They already think that.”

“You mean because you only come out at night and you suck their blood?” I said in a tiny, innocent voice.

“Precisely,” Leif said, unaffected by my teasing.

“No, Leif.” I shook my head in all seriousness. “They don’t figure that out until much later, if they ever figure it out at all. These people think you’re spooky because of the way you talk and the way you behave. They can tell you don’t belong. Believe me, it’s not that you have skin like two-percent milk. Lots of people are scared of skin cancer out here in the Valley of the Sun. It’s once you start talking that people get creeped out. They know you’re old then.”

“But I am old, Atticus!”

“And I’ve got at least a thousand years on you, or have you forgotten?”

He sighed, the weary ancient vampire who had no need for respiration. “No, I have not forgotten.”

“Fine. Don’t complain to me about being old. I hang out with these college kids and they have no clue that I’m not one of them. They think my money comes from an inheritance or a trust fund, and they want to have a drink with me.”

“I find the college children delightful. I would like to have a drink with them too.”

“No, Leif, you want to drink of them, and they can sense that subconsciously because you radiate this predatory aura.”

His affectation of a henpecked husband sloughed away and he looked at me sharply. “You told me they can’t sense my aura as you do.”

“No, they can’t consciously sense it. But they pick up on your otherness, mostly because you don’t respond like you should or act like a man of your cosmetic age.”

“How old do I look?”

“Ehh,” I appraised him, looking for wrinkles. “You look like you’re in your late thirties.”

“I look that old? I was turned in my late twenties.”

“Times were tougher back then.” I shrugged again.

“I suppose. I have come to talk to you about those times, if you are free for the span of an hour or so.”

“Right,” I replied, rolling my eyes. “Just let me go get my hourglass and my freakin’ smoking jacket. Listen to yourself, Leif! Do you want to blend in or not? The span of an hour? Who says shit like that anymore?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“No one is so formal! You could just say ‘if you’re free’ and end it there, though it would have been better to say ‘if you ain’t doin’ nothing.’

“But I enjoyed the anapestic meter of ‘for the span of an hour’ followed by the iamb—”

“Gods Below, you compose your sentences in blank verse? No wonder you can’t carry on a half hour’s conversation with a sorority girl! They’re used to talking with frat boys, not Shakespearean scholars!”

It was my Irish wolfhound, Oberon, speaking directly to my mind through the connection we share. He was probably on the other side of the door, listening to us talk. I told Leif to hold on a second as I spoke with him.

Yes, Oberon, I’m home. Leif’s out here on the front porch, acting his age.

You’re a good hound. Want to come hang out with us?

I have to warn you, it might be boring. He wants to talk about something for a while, and he’s looking particularly grim and Nordic. It might be epic.

Thanks, buddy. I promise we’ll go for a run when he leaves.

I opened the front door and Oberon came bounding out, oblivious to the fact that his wagging tail was delivering steady blows to Leif’s upper arm.

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004J4WND0
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Del Rey (June 7, 2011)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 7, 2011
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3925 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 317 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #38,806 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #269 in Humorous Fantasy (Books)
- #667 in Fantasy Adventure Fiction
- #1,453 in Fantasy Action & Adventure

Customer Reviews:
1,548 ratings

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Kevin Hearne

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KEVIN HEARNE hugs trees, pets doggies, and rocks out to heavy metal. He also thinks tacos are a pretty nifty idea. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling series the Iron Druid Chronicles, the Seven Kennings trilogy that begins with A PLAGUE OF GIANTS, and co-author of the Tales of Pell with Delilah S. Dawson.

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4 star		23%
3 star		5%
2 star 0% (0%)		0%
1 star		1%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Sneaky Burrito

more enjoyable than book 1, I'm definitely continuing on with this series

Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2015

Verified Purchase

It's been a week since I finished this book, so the details aren't totally fresh in my mind. However, I will say that my general impression was favorable, especially in comparison to book one (Hounded). Because this is the second volume in a series, and the writer has a little experience under his belt now, the beginning was much smoother -- there was a lot less infodumping. (And what was there -- for example, the explanation of the dog Oberon's longevity -- was kept short and was better integrated into the story.) So the writing has much improved, and with it, my enjoyment of the book.

One thing that I thought was a strength of the previous book was that the main character, Atticus, was generally likable despite having a different sense of morality than a contemporary American would have (because of his upbringing in a very different time and place). There's a little evidence of that here (especially when he's out to save his own hide), although there are a couple of elements that seem designed specifically to elicit sympathy for Atticus (for example, the story about his activities during WWII, although there was at least a slim connection to the events of the present-day story there, as well). I guess we learn more about Atticus here, although I wouldn't say he develops any greater depth. I have found that with first-person POV series in general, not all books contribute equally to character development, though. Some volumes add more than others. So I'm not feeling cheated here.

I do think Atticus is a little bit less of a male Mary Sue here. He can't do everything on his own; he has to ask for help. And when he asks for help, he has to obtain it from people he'd rather not deal with, or to make compromises he finds a little distasteful. Plus, he has to clean up some messes stemming from his actions in the previous book.

As with the previous volume, most of the magic is based on Celtic mythology. However, other mythologies and theologies make appearances here as well. Atticus must rely on the prayers of a Catholic friend at one point, and we meet some followers of Bacchus/Dionysus. We also encounter a version of the trickster Coyote, and one of the characters has a personal problem with Thor. I rather like all of these disparate elements coming together in one place. One theme in the book is that belief plays a part in making the gods/goddesses what they are. And so only in a country like America, where there are people from all these different cultures living together, would these different mythologies and religions clash. So I think the setting was very appropriately chosen.

This book doesn't really stand on its own. You need to read the previous volume, wherein you are introduced to many characters, and there are a couple of things in this book that will probably get addressed again at later volumes in the series (Atticus makes promises to the witch Laksha and also to one of his attorneys regarding certain quests he's undertaking for them or helping them to undertake, and these aren't resolved; also, one of Bacchus's followers escapes and the implication is that she may be back again). There is a main conflict that is resolved by the end of the book, however -- a new coven of witches is trying to encroach on the territory where Atticus is living, bringing with them all sorts of bad news and events. I don't get too upset about this because I would not call the ending a cliffhanger and I expect some type of series arc to carry through any multi-volume series (there are a handful more volumes out that I haven't read yet).

I seem to remember trying to drop everything to read this, so the pace near the end must have been quite good -- and I definitely wanted to know what happened. In the end, I did enjoy reading this -- more than I enjoyed book one. It wasn't perfect, but it was fun to read and I'm looking forward to the next volume.

6 people found this helpful

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Jonathan Wood

good stuff

Reviewed in the United States on June 24, 2017

Verified Purchase

I'm not an especially big fan of urban fantasy, but the premise of the first book in this series was interesting enough to draw me in and I liked it enough to give this second book a try. I didn't like it quite as much as book one, but I'll probably try at least one more book in the series. I think the part I liked the most was the dialog between Atticus and Oberon, his pooch. The part I didn't like was that Atticus, who has lived hundreds of years by keeping in the shadows, suddenly seems to want to shine brightly. That seems odd to me and not in character, unless there's an explanation for this that I somehow missed.

One person found this helpful

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Jmaynard

Fast paced and great world-building

Reviewed in the United States on June 12, 2016

Verified Purchase

I thought there was a lot of potential in the first book of this series, and I am happy to see it is expanded on in Hexed. Here, a coven of evil witches makes a move on Malina’s territory, which also happens to be Atticus’. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the followers of Bacchus have also dropped into town to unleash chaos via uninhibited orgies, there’s a fallen angel killing high schoolers and everyone wants Atticus to kill Thor. Just another day in the life of a druid.

The first book dis appointed me because everything came to Atticus; someone would conveniently tell him what he needed to know so he never had to be proactive. Thankfully, that is not the case here. The book is very fast paced since there are so many fires for Atticus to put out. This means he has to plan, negotiate and work out how to tackle each crisis. There was a lot of planning involved, with Malina’s coven and Leif, plus the return of Laksha. There’s also a lto of humor here, specifically from Atticus’ knowledge and appreciation of pop culture. I love that he’s trying to teach Leif how not to sound like a stuffy vampire!

I did have a couple of issues with the book. The Morrigan and Brighid both make appearances that go on too long and serve no purpose to the current plot. And, a noticeable amount of the book is taken up with setting up the next book, which will no doubt deal with Thor (and everyone wanting him dead). I don’t mind some build-up for the next book; but it should come near the end, and not at the expense of the story currently being told. However, it didn’t stop me from enjoying the story and I do look forward to the next installment.

Overall, a nice improvement over the first book with some character growth and expanded cast. Recommended to fans of urban fantasy.

2 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Kindle Customer

Top o' the morning to yez.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 19, 2016

Verified Purchase

A good series with an interesting hero. Like many Americans who drink green beer on St Patricks day they are trying to be more Oirish than the Irish themselves and this appears to be the case with the author. Atticus has not said "begorrah" yet but I suspect it is only a matter of time.
That said, it is a good mix of mythology and contemporary memes with a lot of humorous and erudite writing although a hero who has wild sex with goddesses should not be blushing and farting at the sight of his apprentice in her scanties. For a hero with a healthy sense of self-preservation Atticus appears to have little difficulty in dispatching gods, demons, fallen angels and witches so is a testament to 2,000 odd years of healthy food.
The comic relief of Oberon is good and I like the idea of an actual blood-sucking lawyer rather than a merely metaphorical one.

One person found this helpful

Mrs Bee 85

Good, but not great

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 3, 2012

Verified Purchase

I have read all three books in this series now, and I'm always left feeling a little short-changed at the end. I don't know why, full of action, and I like the main concept behind how people/ideas become gods. I suppose one gripe is that it does all seem to be a big blur of killing and sarcastic asides, and I would agree with another reviewer that some of the 'modern culture' bits are laughable, such as the 'Lol-Catz' speak in one of them which was more than just faintly ridiculous. In all, I enjoy these books, but I still don't think Jim Butcher (Dresden Files) has anything to worry about yet. I am a bit indifferent about these, but will still see if the fourth book is any further improvement. Ideas good, execution could do with some improvement. The story behind this book, for example, could have made a much bigger story than it did. A load of fuss and build up, then they seem to sail through the final battles. Meh.

One person found this helpful

CatsAndBooks

Another Good One

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 3, 2013

Verified Purchase

I hesitated before buying this book. The premise of the first book had been so original and funny, I reckoned that another book with the same premise would be stale.
I tried anyway, and am glad I did. The story is as fresh, original and funny as the first.
This time, divine beings and spirits from other belief systems are making an appearance in modern human form. To my surprise, this works. The different religions are treated with respect, and the fictional characters actions are consistent with the values they represent in their religions.
Delighted with this book, I then went on to buy the third ... and that's when it went downhill.

One person found this helpful

captain scapegoat

Enjoyable read but a little lacking in gravitas

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 11, 2012

Verified Purchase

Similar to Bucher's Dresden files but set in the West with a slightly different twist on the magic. It's an enjoyable read, especially the relationship between Atticus and his dog. The books tend to focus on the Fae: the mythologically recorded Tuatha de Denann. As such they always fall short of the gravitas that could be leant to such subject matter. While the narrative can be entertaining, there's a lack of mystery or uncertainty. The Tuatha seem less like the ancient gods of Ireland and more like a bunch of delinquent bullies. (Pfft for all I know there could be a message in there). The whole new world/ancient Irish thing is interesting but the books felt a little too light hearted.

Random Amazon Customer

Hexed: The Iron Druid Chronicles

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 27, 2012

Verified Purchase

This is book two in the series and continues on where Hounded: The Iron Druid Chronicles left off. Atticus is dealing with the aftermath of the events in that book as well as having to deal with a new problem - as the title might suggest - Witches. I really enjoyed this one too and I'm looking forward to starting on the third book Hammered: The Iron Druid Chronicles: Book Three (Iron Druid Chronicles 3) By the time I had finished this, I raved about it so much that three of my friends had started on the series. Great new urban fantasy series with well-written original characters. Let's hope there are many more to come!