Triumph of the Wolf (Magnetic Magic, Book 6) (Part 1)

Welcome, all, to the review of the final book in the Magnetic Magic series. I hope you all have enjoyed the review as much as I enjoyed the series.

This will be another 2-part review. Today, we’ll be covering the big-picture elements. This Sunday, February 8th, we’ll conclude with a look at the finer details. We won’t be doing a retrospective of the whole series here. Instead, that will play out on Sundays from February 22nd through March 13th (nicely fitting between two short stories from Ravenor - the Omnibus).

With all that bookkeeping taken care of, it’s time for one last hunt in the moonlight. Let’s get to it.

STATS

Title: Triumph of the Wolf

Series: Magnetic Magic (Book 6)

Author(s): Lindsay Buroker

Genre: Fantasy (Urban)

First Printing: August 2025

Publisher: Self-published to Amazon

SPOILER WARNING

Mild, unmarked spoilers for the entirety of Triumph 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 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 the book in this series are all 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

We’ll be covering the same points as the previous two books, split across today and Sunday.

• Part 1 (Today)

  • Premise

  • Rating

  • Series

• Part 2 (Sunday, February 8th)

  • Content Warning

  • Plot

  • Character

  • Worldbuilding

  • Prose / Editing

  • Romance

PREMISE

Once more, we’re going straight from the Amazon product page.

Now that Luna has helped Duncan, the charming werewolf she’s fallen in love with, remove the curse that threatened his life, they can finally be together.

Or can they?

When her ex-husband shows up, embroiled in a new plot against the pack, Luna and Duncan find themselves once again fighting for their lives. And then there’s the vengeful Lord Abrams, out to get them for thwarting his plans.

Luna longs for solutions to her problems and a happily ever after, but, with the world conspiring against her, will she find either?

Find out in the conclusion to the Magnetic Magic urban fantasy series!conclusion to the Magnetic Magic series!

Reaction

This premise is very much on the money. Much as was the case in Quest and Curse, this book ends up feeling like it’s trying to too far too much for its limited page count. However, this time, Buroker has properly set our expectations by identifying both of the plots that will get focus right out the gate, rather than leaving one unspoken.

RATING: 6.5/10

Triumph sticks the landing. Despite Buroker trying to do way too much within this relatively short book, she still manages to bring everything to a satisfying resolution. The only reason I don’t rate it higher is that there’s a palpable sense that Buroker didn’t actually have a plan for how she was going to tie up all her loose ends. Her chosen resolutions are fine for improvised endings, yet they do feel somewhat shallow.

SERIES

On that note, let’s talk about how Buroker ties up all those series-spanning plot threads. Some of these will be topics that I covered in previous reviews, while others will be things I glossed over or neglected to mention.

Family

Luna’s ex-husband, Chad, has lurked in the background since the start of the series. He is the origin point of the druidic artifact that Luna found hidden in her bedroom heating vent, and he send Duncan into her life to steal this artifact back from her. Beyond this, he’s mainly been mentioned in passing as a sore spot from Luna’s past, due to both his adultery and plunging the family into debt before she divorced him.

Triumph finally brings Chad into focus and gives Luna two scenes where she confronts him. These are fine. They boil down to Luna showing her ex that she’s more powerful than he ever realized, without any real nuance of character growth for Luna. Likewise, the explanation we eventually get for why Chad wanted the druidic artifact in the first place makes sense, but it’s a lot less interesting than what one might have assumed from the past books (given that Radomir and Abrams were also after those relics).

Also, this book finally introduces Luna’s older son, Cameron. He appears in both of Chad’s scenes and an additional scene at the end of the book. Originally, he’s helping Chad, but he eventually comes around and backs his mother. This is another thing that is functional but not all that interesting. I don’t feel like Cameron was really a loose end that Buroker needed to tie off. On the bright side, though, at least the consequences of Cameron learning that his mother is a werewolf are explored on the page. That’s more than we got for Austin in Quest, despite Austin’s involvement being a selling point.

Radomir & Abrams

With Radomir dead and his laboratory destroyed in the last book, Abrams was seemingly neutralized as a threat. Buroker only needed to address him because, as long as he remains alive, he technically constitutes a narrative loose end. The issue is that he doesn’t really have a goal at this point.

The original plan established for Abrams in Relics was to take over the world with an army of werewolves, using his cloned, hybrid slave (Duncan) to turn people. In Curse, we learned that Abrams was actually hoping that becoming a werewolf himself would make him immortal, with his focus shifting to manipulating werewolf magic to unlock an elixir of immortality.

In Triumph, Abrams is kidnapping werewolves to siphon their blood for … I’m not actually sure this was ever explained. Maybe it’s for the elixir? Except that he still has Duncan’s junior clone, Lykos, in his thrall, so he could have just drawn blood from Lykos (and probably gotten better results, since Lykos is a hybrid himself). He also wants Lykos to kill Duncan for him, but since sending an underfed eight-year-old to assassinate a physically fit 50-year-old is the definition of a fool’s errand, it almost comes across more like he’s trying to dispose of Lykos in a way that might cause Duncan emotional distress. We also learn in this book that Abrams has access to some sort of pocket dimension where he keeps a secret laboratory, which begs the question of why he ever bothered with the far more accessible laboratories that Luna and Duncan visited in the previous books. On top of these things, he wants the wolf medallions from Luna’s pack, but that begs the question why he squanders resources on kidnapping random werewolves instead of having one of his goons plant of bomb on Duncan’s van, blowing up him and Luna, and then stealing the medallion off their corpses.

I don’t dislike the concept that Buroker was going for. I just don’t think it’s executed all that well in terms of the overall story. If she wanted to end the series with a final showdown between Duncan and Abrams, making it about wrestling Lykos free from Abrams’s control seems like it would have bene the better story option.

Raoul & Izzy

Izzy is still out for vengeance against Luna for Raoul’s death in this book. Her attempt to kill Luna results in her getting kidnapped by Abrams’s men. Luna then has to save Izzy during the final confrontation with Abrams.

I’m honestly baffled by the fact Buroker brought this thread up against so late in the series. Raoul’s death worked fine as a component of Luna’s backstory, but the narrative has moved well past that. Izzy just ended up needlessly complicating the narrative

The Ghost Hunters

So, a couple books back, a couple of twenty-something, ghost-hunting women moved into Luna’s apartment complex, drawn by the reports of werewolf activity (due to all those action scenes in the complex’s parking lot). They’ve been a reminder of the risk of Luna’s true nature being discovered by the mundane world. Much like with Office Dubois and the police presence at the apartment complex (both conveniently absent throughout this book), this is something that hasn’t really gone anywhere.

In this book, Buroker brings them up again … for a cock-block.

Buroker starts ramping up for a sex scene between Luna and Duncan, only for them to be interrupted when two men who are revealed to be wizards show up to attack the ghost hunters. Apparently, these two women have destroyed the wizards’ business as spirit mediums (apparently, the paranormal community doesn’t want to work with these men once their business is exposed on social media), and since they obviously can’t explain their magical series in a civil lawsuit, they decided to smash the hunters’ equipment. Luna and Duncan intervene, driving the wizards off, but the equipment is still smashed. This neturalizes the hunters as a threat.

I’m pretty sure this was only brought up so Buroker could tease the audience with a sex scene before swerving away at the last second.

Luna’s Mother

Throughout this series, Luna’s mother has been dying of cancer. This is the book where she finally passes. Luna end up inheriting the responsibility of being the alpha female of the pack as a result, accepting the medallion that her mother has wanted her to claim since Way.

The way this thread wraps up is fine. It is a natural progression of events. I’ll have more to say when we get to Romance, since Luna’s mother was also pushing the whole “offspring” thing.

The Apartment Complex (Heavy Spoilers)

One of the first motivations established for Luna was her desire to own an apartment complex and profit from it directly, rather than just managing one. When her complex was put on the market, it was treated as a major blow and an existential threat.

This series ends with Luna preparing to buy the complex. Turns out Duncan has been rich (or, at least, had a large heap of salvaged gold and silver) this whole time. He offers to provide her with the money to buy the complex from her employers, with the moment being presented as an implicit marriage proposal.

It’s a predictable development, but it works for the story being told. This was the happy ending that I was expecting.

THE WANING MOON

We’ll wrap this review up on this upcoming Sunday. Thank you all for stopping by today. Please remember to subscribe for the newsletter if you’d like a weekly e-mail update with the latest post links, and share this review with others if you enjoyed it. Until next time, take care, and have a good weekend.

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Art by Legion

Volume I of my first serialized Romantasy novel, A Chime for These Hallowed Bones, is now premiering over in Tales of the Five Worlds!

Kabarāhira is a city of necromancers, and among these necromancers, none are more honorable or respected than Master Japjot Baig. Yadleen has worked under him since she was a girl, learning how commune with bhūtas and how to bind these ancient spirits into wights. Her orderly world is disrupted, however, when a stranger appears with the skeleton of a dishonored woman, demanding that her master fabricate a wight for him.

To protect her master from scandal, Yadleen must take it upon herself to meet this stranger’s demands. Manipulating the dead is within her power, but can honor survive in the face of a man who has none?

Chapters 1 and 2 are now available! I hope you’ll join me on this new adventure.