Curse of the Wolf (Magnetic Magic, Book 5) (Part 1)
Hello, all. Welcome back to our ongoing exploration of Magnetic Magic.
Feel free to check the reviews for the previous four books if you need to get caught up on the series. Otherwise, let’s dive right in.
STATS
Title: Curse of the Wolf
Series: Magnetic Magic (Book 5)
Author(s): Lindsay Buroker
Genre: Fantasy (Urban)
First Printing: July 2025
Publisher: Self-published to Amazon
SPOILER WARNING
Mild, unmarked spoilers for the entirety of Quest of the Wolf will be provided throughout this review. The first paragraph of any given section will be kept spoiler-free. Any heavy spoilers for this book will be confined to clearly labelled sections.
Heavy spoilers from the previous books of the Magnetic Magic series will appear throughout this review. These will not be marked. I’m also going to assume that you have already read my reviews for these books, though it’s not necessary to understand this review.
TERMINOLOGY
The names of all these books are rather similar, so we’ll be abbreviating them as follows.
Way of the Wolf (Book 1) = Way
Relics of the Wolf (Book 2) = Relics
Kin of the Wolf (Book 3) = Kin
Quest of the Wolf (Book 4) = Quest
Curse of the Wolf (Book 5) = Curse
Triumph of the Wolf (Book 6) = Triumph
Also, I will be referring to the werewolves in this setting who are capable of assuming a half-human, half-wolf form as “hybrids”. Those of you who have read the past reviews know why.
STRUCTURE
This review will be split into 2 parts. Today, Part 1, will cover the following:
Premise
Rating
Series
Content Warning
Prose / Editing
Part 2, coming on January 13th, will then cover:
Plot
Character
Worldbuilding
Romance
PREMISE
Once more, we’re going straight from the Amazon product page.
Luna has freed the charming treasure-hunting werewolf, Duncan, from the magical control device that let their enemies manipulate him. Finally, she can trust him fully, and they can explore a romantic relationship.
Or so she thinks.
But destroying that device had ramifications…
A curse threatens to take Duncan’s life. If they can’t figure out a way to remove it, Luna will lose the man she’s come to care deeply about—maybe even love.
Reaction
Much like with the previous book, the content of this premise does exist. The issue is that Buroker again puts a lot of focus on the crime problem in Luna’s area, thereby reducing the amount of time this book has to cover the issue of the curse. This is another case where the promised premise gets squeezed out.
RATING: 6/10
Much like its predecessor, Curse suffers because the B Plot crowds out an A Plot that demands time to be properly developed. If this book were considerably longer, I don’t think this would be an issue, but as it stands, Buroker sets up a problem and has to rush its resolution. At the end of the day, she has to resolve the A Plot through contrivance.
That being said, there is a reason why I rate Curse higher than Quest. In Quest, the A Plot was almost entirely disconnected from the B Plot, and the character implications of Duncan being under mind control were not explored anything close to adequately. In Curse, Duncan’s deteriorating condition is the core of the emotional drama, and it interferes with the B Plot on at least one occasion. Buroker may not be advancing the promised A Plot in these situations, but at least she’s keeping it relevant to the story she chose to tell.
SERIES
Curse is another story that functions as a standalone episode within a larger narrative. Duncan’s curse is a consequence of past events, and the efforts to free him from it have consequences that will ripple forward into Triumph, but the overall narrative about the curse is pretty self-contained. Even the B Plot, which continues unresolved plot threads from Quest, feels more like a series of self-contained action beats than something that progresses from past stories.
The Thugs
As we’ll get to in Plot, the plot thread of the thugs appears to get resolved in this book. A large number of the main gang is dead by the end of the story, they lose not only their motorcycles but also the magical tools they wielded in the previous book, the house of one of their members gets blown up by Radomir, and we further learn that they were working for Radomir for at least the events of Quest (which is when their targeted harassment of Luna really ramped up). I’m not saying that Buroker couldn’t continue this thread into Triumph. It would just feel very forced at this point.
Raoul & Izzy
Curiously, Buroker chooses this book to revive an element that has been nearly irrelevant since Way. Back in Way, the reason given for Luna turning her back on her family and heritage and choosing to take the werewolf suppression potion was that she killed her lover, Raoul, in a clash while they were both in wolf form. This has been presented as a motivation but never deeply explored. In this book, Luna encounters Raoul’s cousin Izzy, and Izzy tries to kill her, forcing Luna to defend herself Izzy is still at large at the end of the book.
I’m very confused by this beat. It feels rather late in the story for this to be brought up again. I really have no idea how Buroker plans to resolve this in the last book, given that she has two other balls to juggle.
Family
As it turns out, Curse does not explore the fallout of Austin learning that his mother is a werewolf. He has gone back to his military job before the book even begins. His only interaction with the plot is a letter he writes to Luna, telling her that he’d told his brother Cameron and asking basic questions (like whether he was going to develop wolf powers of his own).
At this point, the involvement of Luna’s son in this series just feels awkward. Maybe Buroker intended it to be what prompts the events of Triumph. If so, it wasn’t necessary. Luna’s ex-husband has been involved in this series since Way, having hired Duncan to get the druid relic in the wolf case away from Luna. He could have returned for the finale without learning that his sons now knew Luna’s secret.
Radomir & Abrams (Heavy Spoilers)
This book finally explains what Radomir and Abrams are up to. While it’s not the most original thing, it does make sense within the rules of the world.
It turns out that, while Abrams’s originally stated goal was to rule the world through an army of werewolves, his true interest is to tap into the magic that grants werewolves their longevity and healing to create a potion for immortality (or at least long life and health).Radomir is funding him in hopes of benefitting from this research. They wanted the amulets from Luna’s pack and the druid relic in the wolf case precisely because they enhance such magic.
This is fine as a motivation. I suspect that Buroker is retconning Abrams’s intentions to better fit with the A Plot about Duncan being cursed and needing magic to save himself, yet it’s a retcon that blends in well enough. I do find the exposition about this rather ham-fisted. Luna and Duncan just happen upon Abrams’s journal, wherein he pours out his soul and describes his supposed lifelong motivation for no apparent reason.
That reveal isn’t why I put a spoiler warning though. That’s in place because, by the end of the book, Radomir is dead. Duncan kills him by jumping on the roof of his SUV while in hybrid form, breaking thorugh the windshield, and steering the SUV off a cliff.
I am conflicted about this. Radomir dying like this makes sense in terms of progression of cause and effect. As demonstrated in Quest and at multiple points throughout Curse, Radomir is so insanely desperate to get his hands on the wolf relics that he shows up in-person for dangerous tasks that he should really leave to his various hired minions. The fact that he shows up in the climax, thereby putting himself in a position for Duncan to kill him, makes perfect sense.
At the same time, though, Radomir has really been the driving force behind his faction. Yes, Duncan and Abrams have history, and Abrams himself does appear in this book, but Abrams feels more like a living reminder of Duncan’s backstory that someone driving the plot. I’m doubtful that he can fill Radomir’s narrative role in the finale, no matter what Buroker insists in the Premise for Triumph.
CONTENT WARNING
There’s nothing here that wasn’t in the previous books: lots of nudity, some sexual innuendo, violence that occasionally gets bloody.
At this point, both the fact that Luna keeps winding up naked (and getting caught in that state by people who aren’t werewolves) and the fact that consequences for public nudity never manifest are starting to feel absurd. It led me to do some digging. As it turns out, public nudity is legal in Seattle - only “indent exposure” is outlawed. That does at least explain how Luna and Duncan have managed to avoid any legal consequences for this actions. Which begs the question: did Buroker set this story in Seattle so that she could avoid having to deal with such consequences? If so, that’s a clever work-around.
All the same, the presentation of the nudity still feels like a gimmick. Perhaps what bothers me most about it is the fact that Luna keeps destroying her clothes but somehow still has the same cell phone. It conveniently flies out of her pocket in one scene of this book, and in the finale, it survives rubble falling on it. The fact Buroker keeps playing the, “Good gracious, I seem to be naked,” card while resorting to contrivance to avoid the other logical consequence of werewolf shapeshifting really doesn’t help the impression that the nudity is a gimmick.
PROSE / EDITING
I don’t have a lot to comment upon here. Buroker remains stylistically consistent with the previous books in the series, for better and for worse. That said, there is one element that baffled me somewhat.
Throughout the book, Luna refers to Radomir and Abrams as “bad guys”. She actively frames them as Saturday morning cartoon villains. To a certain extent, I can understand Luna saying this. Her limited perspective of these two does paint them as cartoon villains. She doesn’t have any reason to think anything deeper of them.
Where is gets weird is when she assigns motive to them. It’s established early in the book that Radomir and Abrams are trying to buy her apartment complex. Luna jumps to the conclusion that this is a hoax, that they have no intention of actually buying the complex and just want to search the property for the relics they know are in her possession. The thing is, she has no reason to rule out that this is an honest sale. As far as she is aware, Radomir and Abrams have the means to buy the complex, and tearing the place apart to find the relics is plenty of motive. They might even just want to own the place so that they can keep an eye on Luna (and, though her, Duncan). After all, if they know enough about Luna to arrange the trap for her son in Quest, then they know enough about her to realize they could very easily gain leverage over her by legally becoming her employers.
The reason I’m presenting this as a prose issue, rather than one of Plot or Character, is that this presentation of Radomir and Abrams as mere “bad guys” synergizes with the banter to make the story feel like a lighthearted romp that we aren’t supposed to take seriously. I could somewhat get on board with this. The problem is that the emotional core of this story is that Luna’s Love Interest is dying. That’s something we are meant to take seriously. Luna being so casual about the people responsible for his condition undermines more of the emotional weight of this scenario.
THE DETAILS
That about covers all the big-picture elements of the book. I hope you’ll join me on Sunday as we wrap up this review with a deeper dive into the Plot, Worldbuilding, Character, and the handling of the Romance.
Thank you all for stopping by today. Please remember to subscribe and share if you like what you read here. Take care, everyone, and have a great weekend.
