Dauphine Gautier, a young but powerful witch, is being hunted by a coven that wants to use her power. After she was nearly killed she seeks aid from her own friends and coven in New Orleans.

This is a light paranormal story, mainly setting up the world. While there are some faint chills, there’s never any outright horror and our heroine never really feels as though she is truly in danger during the story. This may be because the story is short, and because she’s powerful enough that when she works out what is going on she can handle it: perhaps why the bad guys work by misdirection. Our heroine isn’t stupid and what happened to drive her to seek help from her friends is genuinely nasty and makes her easy to sympathise with.

After what I have been reading, this book had a first page with no spelling errors. I would have fallen on my knees and given thanks, but arthritis is a cruel mistress. The grammar is good and the only spelling error I saw was “ads” for “adds” halfway through. The formatting sometimes slips an extra space at the start of a paragraph but it is otherwise consistent. The cover nearly had me pass over this as red text on grey isn’t the easiest to read, but don’t let it put you off.

Overall, Gaslight is a decent urban paranormal short story, with a creative world and some interesting characters which I’d like to see more of. The story isn’t long enough to really distinguish its world on its own, but I’d suggest urban paranormal fans pick it up and keep an eye for possible follow-ups. The author is good enough to do something really creative with this, either as a series of shorts or a longer form story.

An easy to read and enjoyable short story for paranormal fans, and keep an eye out for future stories in this series.