This is book 7, “All Your Wishes”, in a series billed as “paranormal romance.” That’s code for “straight-up romance with a werewolf instead of a pirate” but the blurb made it sound like more than that. Besides being book 7, where a decent series might have gone bad, it’s by only one of the original two authors.
The overall backstory is that magic and science have coexisted for a long time. Stores sell real magical charms, there exist combo magi-tech items, police forces employ mages, anti-vampire fences are common, magic is taught at college, and so on. Fully integrated and has been that way forever, so that’s fun.
The main character is a 1/2-vampire, 1/2-siren (and 1/2-human?) detective, running her agency out of a former church. Her best friends and employees are a werewolf, a wizard and a ghost. Nothing special there. Going against tradition, she’s generally happy with her appearance — vampires are a sexy pale and siren’s are naturally beautiful. But at least she has personal problems: sirens magically bring out the catiness in other women. 1/2-vampires need to frequently eat gross baby food and smoothies, use lots of sunscreen, and they lisp horribly when their fangs pop out. She was turned into one by an attack and is not happy about it. She’s also cursed.
Her boyfriend is a sexy mage with strong hands from a family of powerful mages, and also mobsters. They start off with a big unspecified argument that sounds like it could be trouble — maybe about children. But he’s gone the entire book visiting his dying mother, then is out of the picture. We never find out what the argument was about. The extent of their romance is her calling him to ask if his mom is dead yet. In the 1-year-later epilogue she gets together with a cute, minor character with whom she previously had no sparks. I’m guessing the absent writing partner handled the romance parts.
The plot starts with a client being told to contact her by his oracle, then being told to take the case by her oracle. As everyone knows, you can’t ask oracles too many questions. That goes for readers, too — she just has to help the guy, OK? In case you’re wondering, she solves the case by doing something else her oracle told her to do.
The plot involves some super-evil wizards from a previous book, including an evil wizard ghost sworn to kill her (also from a previous book) led by a super-powerful demon. We never find out their plot, but they free a super-powerful genie for it, who, shocker, gets out of hand and possesses the main character’s body. It either wants to go home, or to free a bunch of other evil genies (in the book, it’s the first — it’s a genie serial-killer of other genies and wants to kill the judge who sentenced it; but the book jacket says it wants to free an evil genie army).
At the very end, she wins by realizing she has friends. Literally just realizing. She suddenly remembers she has siren telepathy, which she has been using through-out the book, and reaches out to all of her friends at once. That gives her the strength to shake off the genie control. Then she executes the plan she made with the only female genie-keeper and her young son (who hasn’t yet grown into a swaggering jerk of a man). The stupid male genie-keepers were all “you’re not an initiate and are the wrong sex. You can’t do anything”. That’s why diversity is important.
Various secondary events are crammed in:
- Her main evil ghost enemy dies after her heart stops in an unrelated matter (her death was it’s Unfinished Business.) After constantly being reminded of how lethal wizard ghosts are, this is the first time we see him. He just shows up, says “I was actually just hanging around waiting for someone else to kill you, and they did,” and poofs away. Just in case readers notice that she’s had her heart stopped several times before, her friends ask her “haven’t you had your heart stopped several times before?” and she explains this was extra-stoppy, so fooled the ghost in a way the previous heart-stops couldn’t.
- We very briefly meet a guy from a previous book, just so we can see him dead later.
- After she wins, it’s mentioned in passing that the main group of genie-keepers were all murdered elsewhere. Why? She already won, so it’s not part of the plot. Maybe it’s to avoid fan fiction using them?
- Also after winning, we go back in time (she’s literally taken back in time) to see her boyfriend get killed by the mob (remember the one she briefly talked to in chapter 1? That guy). I feel like she could have watched a video, or maybe since the story was over, done that at the start of the next book?
- Immediately after winning, a good genie, who had been calmly watching them fight the evil one, pops up and brings her werewolf friend back to life (he died one page ago, which inspired her to fight harder.) Those wacky genies and their rules.
The book respects the rule where we have to learn more about the world. We get professional magic-using hitmen. We learn demons can appear without being summoned if they time it exactly when a ghost dies, since that makes a tunnel from here to the otherworld. Genies are new to the series, and we learn genie-keeper powers come from being part genie. If you use mental telepathy in an airport, we learn the TSA has magic to spy on it. Then we get a nice teaser: her mom is not just a siren, but a siren queen, and she’s been summoned for important sea-princess business in book 8.