Pros: Fantastic character interplay; gorgeous world-building. I think I’m falling in love with Ritsuko and Mikani.
Cons: Occasional difficulty telling which of the partners is speaking
Rating: 5 out of 5
Release date: April 30, 2013
Review book courtesy of Penguin Group
Celeste Ritsuko and Janus Mikani solve murders for the Criminal Investigation Division. She’s the division’s first female inspector, and an orderly, meticulous detective. He’s a sloppy, charming pain-in-the-ass with an extremely useful—and very debilitating—sixth sense. The two of them have forged an unlikely and delightfully symbiotic partnership as they work to protect people from harm.
Then a daughter of one of the great Houses goes missing, and they’re under the gun to find her—or else. When she turns up murdered in a particularly unusual and gruesome fashion, traces of magic polluting the scene, Ritsuko and Mikani realize they’re hunting a madman. And if they don’t find him soon, losing their jobs will be the least of their worries.
is by Jayne Ann Krentz, writing as Jayne Castle. It’s an odd book, set in a world called Harmony, peopled with folks who have odd and unusual abilities, containing such creatures as dust bunnies (they seem to make very devoted companions)—among more dangerous things. Yet it’s surprisingly modern-day in its setting despite that, complete with roads, cottages, and even SUVs. (I gather there are other Harmony novels, but I found this one stood alone surprisingly well.)
is a “Spellbound Falls” romance. It seems to be billed as one of those books that’s set in the same world as an author’s previous books, but that’s supposed to stand alone relatively well. Or at least, that’s the impression I got from the cover. Certainly we’re seeing more and more of this lately—we’re getting more series of indeterminate length, often with smaller print runs, meaning that you can’t assume a reader will have read all previous books when they pick up a new one (particularly if you’re hoping to pick up new readers as you go along). At any rate, my impression was definitely wrong. While the story itself sort of stands alone (at least for the first 100 pages, which is what I read before stopping), the world does not. Sure, you can tell there’s some paranormal to the world as you read, but it hits a point where the author is just dumping in mention of weird thing after weird thing, late enough in the game that it feels like an out-of-nowhere genre shift. (Even the back-of-the-book text, if you aren’t familiar with the series, gives no real indication that this is a paranormal romance, other than the “Spellbound Falls” moniker.)
