Maureen is one of those characters in a book that you don't quite like, but you don't quite know why. She's a highly competent person who's at the same time no better than she has to be. She's pretty, red-haired, with freckles and a long lean dancer's body. This makes sense because she runs a dance troupe, and she's also a member of the Ring -- a very powerful circle of British witches.
And although Maureen doesn't realize it, she's also the target of some very sophisticated spying by her latest boyfriend Joe -- a messy, posturing lager lout who runs a music shop, but who has been sent by a group of pirates to keep an eye on what's happening with the witches in the Ring.
Maureen seems to have slept with just about everybody there was to be slept with at one time or another, and gives off that impression of powerful sexuality. Even the members of her witches circle don't entirely trust her, and halfway through the novel we begin to see why, when the boyfriend takes her captive in her own apartment and proceeds to wait her out until she falls asleep, when his own magic powers can more easily scan all her thoughts.
The scenes where she and Joe lock wills are among the least appealing scenes in the novel -- by the last of them, about the best you can say is that the two of them deserve one another. You can tell that I don't like Maureen, and by the time you read any part of this book, I expect you'll have a good idea of why.