“The Ghoul Vendetta” is the 4th book in the 2013 “SPI files” series. It features a female agent in a global, government sanctioned monster-hunting agency. She’s human (booo!) but is an ultra-rare “seer” who can ignore illusions and in general detect magic (which we’re told is a big deal in this world since all badguys have easy access to illusion spells). Does she go rogue after not being allowed on the big cases since she’s a woman? Nope. Is she about to be fired for making friends with the not-so-bad members of the bad guys? Also, no. She’s pretty much a team player contributing to the overall sucess in her own small way. Huh.
But what about her boyfriend? Well, he’s a sexy David Bowie-style dark-mage goblin. At the start they’re on what may be a date. Before one fight they kiss for the first time. Then again for the first time before the big battle. Then a wise all-knowing ghost tells her boyfriend “you have already chosen this world over your own because of your love for this woman”. That would be pretty hot if anything led up to it. We’re told he’s a big shot in his world, but don’t really see it. We also can’t see why he loves her — she seems to be just doing her job. Her over-protective alpha-male ex-special-forces partner (who has a steady GF) and her goblin lover face-off — very hot in a “you may have fooled her but you’ll have to do better to get my aproval” way — but then he’s kidnapped. We’re left with the SPI beauracracy deciding he’s worthy of a Visitor’s pass since he seems to really love her. Be still my heart.
The plot doesn’t gel. Some bad guys have been stealing random artifacts to drain later as magic-power-batteries. Some of them are the bones of ancient vampires, which apparently all vampire families secretly keep as their most precious treasures. The opening scene has the bad guys kidnapping a very well-protected vampire child who is quickly killed, but also slowly tortured for info on where the bones are (which we later find out he wasn’t trusted with). We meet a vampire head-of-household, but then the vampire angle fizzles out — the bones are just generic “power” for some ritual. At the end the good guys just return them, to the vampires.
We get a tour of SPI’s CSI-like many high-tech labs with quirky specialists, where they discover the bad guys were only disguised as teleporting ghouls (“ah yes, ghouls are well-known teleporters”, no one said) but are really disguised evil sea-monsters trying to break the ancient curse which banished them. They don’t seem very banished to me. The main character helps figure this out, and at the end saves the day with a rash action, but otherwise we pretty much just watch a government agency functioning from her point-of-view.
We never get much of a feel for the bad guy. He seems to delight in taunting her partner. We find out the bad guy ate her partner’s ex-partner 5 years ago, right in front of him. The big baddie even gives them what turns out to be a super-magic spear artifact enchancted to kill badguys and attuned to her partner which awakens his racial memories of being a descendant of one of the good guys who originally banished them. You’d think that means big baddie needed him to “awaken” for some spell to work — nope. He merely thinks giving your enemies a priceless artifact is a way to really make them angry. The big battle has dragons out of nowhere which don’t really do much, and is saved by ghosts of the ancient good-guys, riding in Lord of the Rings style, completely out of left field.
I’m at a loss. The series isn’t about a woman doing things her way in a man’s world. It’s not about a single woman able to hunt monsters and have a full life on her terms, including romance. It’s not even close to a Romance novel — it has less of that than most non-Romances. The secret world part is bland — werewolves and vampires and generic magic (the bad guys here are the Irish “Fomorians”. Nice, but been done before). I’m going to refer to an earlier comment — this series is for people who wished CSI-Miami had a magical spin-off told from the perspective of a junior female investigator. Which is apparently a thing people want.