So they decide to go back in time to Atlantis before it disappears so that they can attempt to fix whatever happened to cause this taboo and then go back to present day and live happily taboo-free ever after. The story goes that a male and a female wizard in present day Seattle fall in love, but for some reason it's taboo for male and female wizards to fall in love.

And yes, the story is partially set in Seattle, but nothing happens to distinguish the setting from any other city in the world-I don't think it even rains. Yes, the main characters are nominally wizards and yes, they do inexplicable things, but I doubt many fans of fantasy would include this novel in that genre. This is definitely a romance novel and not a fantasy novel. If I had, I would have seen the steamy harlequin romance picture there and probably would have put this right back on the shelf. I like magic, I like Seattle-this seemed perfect! Honestly, I didn't even turn the book over to read the back before I bought it. This book was an impulse buy for me in the check out line of the grocery store a few years back. Although this book is too awful to finish, it gets a second star because it is at least imaginative, and because Hooper uses the English language correctly, without the annoying mistakes in grammar and word usage that mark many recent books of this disposable sort. Today I skipped to the end, which harkened back to the plot she seemed to be introducing in the start, which has not been referred back to in over two hundred pages. In the past decade or so I have managed to read a little over half the book, a couple pages at a time before clutching my hair, exclaiming 'arggh!' and returning it to the shelf. I got this by accident years ago when trying to find Wizard of the Pigeons, which I could not at the time recall the name of. The few supporting characters are totally cardboard: Ugly Rapist Yokels.

And a ridiculously underdeveloped romance between a mighty wizard and his too-stupid-to-live apprentice, whom I have no idea why he didn't just kick to the curb years ago. Kay Hooper + originality = batshit insane. Why, I wondered, couldn't she have a little more originality? After three or so I gave up reading Hooper's books because I couldn't tell them or the characters apart. They fall in love, or so the text wants the reader to believe.

Usually this takes place in some podunk town where there is also a local with psychic powers to be guided by the agent. Most of Kay Hooper's novels, the ones that made her successful, are thrillers that follow a strict formula: a serial killer, sometimes with psychic powers, being pursued by a government agent(s) with psychic powers.

The Wizard of Seattle by Kay Hooper