Too Hexed to Handle

A wet couple walks into the Honeysuckle Inn asking for two rooms, and Daisy Flowers nudges a vase of roses across the bar. The petals are dusted with lust powder. She is sorry, she tells them, but there is only one room left, and it has only one bed. Then her gardener leans over her shoulder, slides a second key across the counter and announces that the flooded room has been fixed. Too Hexed to Handle by Charlotte Ingham opens on that tug of war, and it is a good joke with a sad engine underneath: the woman who manufactures romance for strangers has made sure she can never have any.

How It Works

The world runs on feelings you can smell. Souleaters, feared and hunted since a famous killing three centuries ago, sense emotions as scents (fear is sharp citrus, desire is chilli, worry is over-stewed tea) and can channel them through their nails into dark magic. Every victim who survives is left with a hexmark and a curse built to fit them.

Daisy has two of these problems. She was hexed during an attack on her town’s festival two years ago, and since then anyone she kisses dies. She is also, secretly, a Souleater herself, one who has spent her life refusing to feed. Her live-in gardener, Astin, lost his sister in the same attack. He does not believe in love, he owns seven shirts dyed one colour for each weekday, and, as she learns in chapter four, he hunts her kind at night.

The plot arrives as a newspaper advert. A self-styled Emerald King claims to have found the legendary cure for Souleater magic and offers endless riches to whoever retrieves it. The inn is drowning in debt, the cure could make Daisy ordinary, and so the pair set off through Wolf Forest towards a ruined castle and a contest that requires two hidden artefacts to open a sealed temple. The structure of Too Hexed to Handle by Charlotte Ingham is a classic quest with a romance threaded through it: a party, a race to find each artefact, rival contestants turning on one another, and an itinerary that keeps forcing the pair into ever smaller spaces. Daisy has a hidden edge, too. Any object a Souleater has enchanted should carry the scent of the feeling behind it, and she may be the only competitor who can sniff one out.

What Too Hexed to Handle Does With One Bed

Romance readers know the forced-proximity rules by heart, and the smartest thing here is that Daisy knows them too. She has watched the trick work on guests so often that she treats it as a law of nature, so when a crowded roadside inn offers her and Astin a single room, she panics on the stairs, convinced that sharing a mattress will make them fall in love and then kill him. The book gets genuine comedy out of a heroine who believes in her favourite trope more than the reader does.

The scent device is the other clever move. Astin’s emotions are muddled and hard to read, which is why Daisy can relax near him, and when one does break through, it floors her. That turns every glance into evidence. Too Hexed to Handle by Charlotte Ingham lets the heroine read the hero’s desire before he admits it, while also making her hunger a danger to him, which keeps the attraction and the threat in the same breath.

What works

• Daisy’s voice. She ranks inns out of five stars mid-crisis, fears every bird with flapping wings, and keeps a pink quill so her deficit looks cheerful. The jokes double as armour, and the book knows it.
• The emerald forest. A castle and woods turned to gemstone by one man’s bare hands is a striking piece of imagery, and his enchanted gloves make him a sympathetic mirror for Daisy at first.
• The love maze. A festival hedge maze dusted with aphrodisiac at its heart produces the best set piece of the first half: funny, steamy and plot-relevant at once.
• Seeding. The solution to the central romantic obstacle is planted early and fairly, and it lands.

Where Too Hexed to Handle Gives Ground

• The last act explains itself to death. Three long revelation scenes arrive almost back to back near the end of Too Hexed to Handle by Charlotte Ingham, each one stopping the action to rewrite the history of the world.
• Convenience does heavy lifting. Several late turns depend on a power, a family tree or a hidden ally appearing exactly when needed.
• The hero’s arc stalls. Astin retreats to the same objection more than once, and his past as a killer is set aside in a couple of lines.
• Forgiveness comes cheap. One character responsible for terrible harm is excused remarkably fast, and the tonal leap from a scene of mass death to sex in a few chapters will jar some readers.
• Rough edges. The UK edition has a handful of typos and one garbled sentence, and verbal tics repeat often.

Read These Next

1. The Kiss Curse by Erin Sterling, a small-town witch romance where a kiss carries a spell’s weight.
2. The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna, a lonely witch, a grumpy man and a found home.
3. Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree, cosy fantasy about running a business on hope and a tight budget.
4. Bride by Ali Hazelwood, for the forbidden-species attraction with more heat.
5. A Match Made in Hell by Charlotte Ingham, her debut, a separate story about a dead woman bargaining with a devil.

About Charlotte Ingham

Charlotte Ingham is a fantasy and romance writer from South Wales. Hot Key Books signed her in a two-book deal in October 2024, and Too Hexed to Handle by Charlotte Ingham is the second of those books, a standalone published in the UK on 10 September 2026, so it is out now.

• Her debut, A Match Made in Hell (September 2025), is also a steamy fantasy rom-com; we have not reviewed it yet
• She won RevPit, an online editing contest for unagented writers, in 2023
• Her agent describes her as an animal lover who once hugged an alligator
• The persecution plot borrows the logic of the witch-hunt, with wardens, inspections and a festival that celebrates an execution

What Stays With You

The image that sticks is not the gemstone castle or the magic battles but a nervous woman standing at the foot of a staircase, certain that one shared bed will be fatal for the man she loves. Too Hexed to Handle by Charlotte Ingham overloads its ending with exposition and lets some characters off lightly, yet its heart, its heat and its jokes work.

Some books end with a kiss. This one makes you wait for it.