Under Dark Skies by AJ Scudiere

Errata: "the Jeremy Kite incidence" I think the author means 'incident'. "He couldn’t figure it out." Should be ‘She couldn’t figure it out’

I am avowedly not into werewolf or vampire stories for the most part because they're far too cookie-cutter: each one is a clichéd clone of the last, especially if it's a YA story (which this blessedly is not). This particular one promised to be different and thankfully it started out quite differently, and I liked it very much, but the more I read, the less I liked it because it was so trudging and inauthentic, and although the author took a commendably different tack with the werewolf part of the story - which is something I advocate authors to do, but so rarely see - she fell down on the realism with regard to the FBI investigation over missing children.

One immediate problem with this narrative is that while it is thankfully not in first person, it is told alternatingly from the perspectives of the main two characters, which means tediously going over the same ground we already covered, but from the other protagonist's perspective. That became an irritant in short order, and led to me quickly skipping portions of the text where this happened.

One sad trope the author didn't skip I'm sorry to say, was the haunted backstory that I've seen done to death far too many times and of which I am so bored. Are there no detectives who don't have a haunted past? No PI's? No FBI agents? No CIA officers? LOL! Not in the fictional world there are not, and it is such a tired trope. FBI agent Eleri is a woman whose lost sister has haunted her for years (not literally). Donovan is a werewolf. Both work for the FBI division of Nightshade, although they may as well be regular FBI agents for all the part that 'nightshade' actually plays in this story.

Eleri is the experienced agent and she plays mentor to Donovan, who is a new recruit who was previously a medical examiner, so the pair are like Fox and Mulder from X-Files with genders reversed. Other than that, this isn't remotely like X-Files. It's simply a missing children story, so why nightshade division needed to be involved is a mystery. That said, I read only fifty percent of this before giving up on it, so I may have missed something more supernatural toward the end.

At one point they locate a dead body in a shallow grave and Eleri supposedly helps excavate the body, but I seriously doubt that an FBI field agent would be on her knees digging up a body when an expert forensic team is there. She would just get in the way and mess up stuff. I may be wrong - I'm not an FBI expert, but it just seemed off base to me. There were times reading this when it felt like the author was putting shit into the story just to show off how much research she'd done rather than getting on with the story. I don't appreciate it when authors do that. If you feel like some things need to be in there, then there are much more subtle ways of doing it than were exhibited here.

The story has it that children are going missing and it's connected to a religious cult called The Children of God, situated in a remote part of Texas, so the agents head down there and then hit such an unrealistic series of coincidences that it became too much. On top of that, there was a lethargy about raiding the cult's camp that was utterly insupportable. That's why I quit reading in the end. I guess the author did it to have a big showdown at the end, but it came off as just plain stupid.

So, first absurd coincidence is that while out reconnoitering the cult's compound as his werewolf self, by accident, Donovan encounters a kid called Joshua who has escaped the compound. He's bleeding badly from a wound apparently inflicted with the edge of a shovel, and he has a broken arm and bruises, and Donovan and Eleri take him to a hospital, but despite the kid's descriptions of the brutal life there, do they raid the place? No! They don't consider this enough evidence to do that! Instead they're more concerned about finding a good place to sleep the night.

Second, and again purely by accident, they find a girl also from the camp, and who tells the same kind of stories about it that Joshua has told them. This girl is identified as one of the missing girls, and her story corroborates everything Joshua has already told them. She has also been badly treated. Do they raid the place? No! They don't consider this enough evidence to do that! Instead they're more concerned about finding a good place to eat.

Next, and again purely by coincidence, they encounter a truck driver who has picked up one or two kids from the camp and helped them out. He corroborates a story about a girl from the camp who sought medical help at a hospital, and later was killed in the camp, according to Joshua. Do they raid the place? Hell no! They don't consider this enough evidence to do that! Instead they're more concerned about the endless Texas heat. I'm sorry, but this is bullshit and piss-poor writing. This is thoroughly unrealistic and just stupid. It really turned me off the story and that's when I quit reading. It was too much.

I liked that Eleri's power was that she would dream true things and this helped the investigation, but there were still issues with this: in that she wasn't much more aggressive in finding her missing sister who she dreamed of often. There was a poor excuse made for why she didn't, but given that this supposedly haunted her for years, it made no sense that she hadn't pursued it when younger. I think that the young Eleri's quest to rescue her sister would have made a better story than this one turned out to be.

The werewolf part of the story I liked for the most part, but there were problems even with that. For example when he's investigating the compound, the author has Donovan's wolf sprint at over 30 mph for an hour, which isn't possible. Wolves can reach some 30 mph, but only in short bursts, and from the pseudo-scientific descriptions that are given, Donovan's change from human to wolf is a physical thing involving readjustment of his bones, which makes it seem like, rather than become a wolf, he's really a worst of both worlds wolf-human hybrid, and therefore he'd be hampered by his change, not enhanced by it. And no explanation is given for why two species as disparate as a dog and a human, would even remotely have a hybrid.

It's supposed to be through mutations, but given that canines and humans have not shared a common ancestor for well over forty million years, there's nothing to support even a fictional attempt to pretend there's any science involved in the hybrid. Plus, if two organisms can mate and successfully produce viable offpring, they're the same species, so this hybrid idea is nonsensical unless you keep it purely in the supernatural realm. You can't turn pure fiction into science. The idiot creationists learned that a good while back.

At one point the author has Donovan say, of his enhanced sense of smell, "I have a larger nasal cavity inside my head than most straight-up humans." He's trying to suggest this is why his sense of smell works so much better than most, but that's not actually how it works - not all of it. Dogs have a unique organ in the base of the nose called Jacobson's organ, for example, that humans do not have - or anything like it. They also have maybe as many as 300 million olfactory receptors in their nose whereas humans have some six million, so yes, having a large area for detecting smells is important, but it would be larger than any human has, and it's no good unless you have the brainpower to process that information.

Dogs devote 40 times more brainpower to processing smells than do humans. All of this ultimately goes back to your genetic complement. The olfactory receptor part of the vertebrate genome is the largest genome superfamily, signifying how important it is to us, and whereas humans have around 900 'smelling genes', rodents have almost twice that many. We have a lot that are broken and useless because they were no longer critical to our survival, so there was no evolutionary benefit to maintaining them, whereas dogs have a stunningly impressive ability to smell tiny concentrations of odor, so there's no doubt they have more functional genes in this department than we do. None of this is even mentioned in Donovan's 'explanation'. I felt more could have been done, or else the author needs to abandon any attempt to pretend there's any sort of rational scientific basis behind Donovan being a werewolf and just leave it in the supernatural.

As it was, I could have let those things slide, but the trudging and lethargic pace of the investigation, which led to me skipping parts of the narrative just to get past those bits, together with the absurd coincidences and lucky breaks, the obsession with inner monologues, with the Texas heat, and with dining and sleeping arrangements, and the complete lack of anyone's interest in raiding a cultist camp that was clearly abducting and abusing children and women was so ridiculous that I couldn't stand to read any more of this. I'm done with this series and with this author.

Strays by Cheree Alsop

Rating: WARTY!

Errata etc: "...giving the merest wave of his fingers to thwart off his angry daughter" Thwart off?! No. Find the right word, please!

"I’ll turn the time over to Professor Kaynan" Kaynan? Seriously? Why not just call him Canine? If you're writing a parody, by all means go for the dumb-as snames.

This is Werewolf Academy, book one, and so it's yet another series I won't be reading. Normally I avoid werewolf stories like I do mass gatherings of unvaccinated people, but I like to keep in touch with the various genres, so once in a while I 'make the sacrifice' and read something outside of my comfort zone. Oh how we artistic types pay for our art, don't we? LOL! This one sounded not too awful, which means the book description never ended-up being the subject of one of my 'non-reviews', but even so, I had serious issues with it from the off.

I've never been a fan of vampire and werewolf stories because in general, they're so trope and clichéd, and profoundly stupid, but I've read one or two here and there. Or tried to. The thing about this one that bothered me is that it's set in an academy - a high school for werewolves - and it makes me wonder why writers of these novels are so uninventive and so bound by convention.

The problem with this kind of a story as I see it, is that it's supposed to be about an alien lifeform in effect: a werewolf, yet the story is exactly the same as it would have been had it been about a regular academy, and regular humans, with no supernatural input whatsoever. You could have removed the werewolf element and told the exact same story. So why even introduce werewolves if you're not really going to go there?

It's the same characters who think and talk just like regular high-schoolers, never mind that they're all werewolves. There are the same conventions and the same high school tropes. Obviously you can't make it so alien that a reader can't begin relate to the characters, but you'd think that somewhere along the way, the author might want to stretch and put in something a bit alien, a bit supernatural, yet they never do. Particularly not this one.

There's no 'wolf' in this story at all. It's all human all the way. Oh yes, there's a token nod and a wink to 'wolf cutlure' but that's entirely confined to pack mentality, as though werewolves are exactly like wolves, and not some alien form or some combo of human and wolf. The school, contrary to what the story yaps on about family, isn't the pack.

Instead there are twelve packs in the school, and rather than follow the school teachings about all working together for the good of werewolves, there's an appalling rivalry between them, along with cliché bullying, none of which is restrained by the teaching staff. In short it's pathetic and right down there with the worst examples of a typically bad high-school story. At one point, there's a fight scene stolen straight out of that execrable Divergent garbage, again with the flimsiest of justification. It's really atrocious.

The characters are exactly like regular humans at all times, even when hunting down a slightly lame deer and brutally slaughtering it, and then trying to justify this appalling cruelty by claiming the deer would never have survived the winter. What? Why? becuase it coudlntl hunt game? Deer dontl hunt, moron! They eat bark and whatever else they can find. A slight lameness isn't a problem. And who are they to judge that? Maybe it was a weredeer! LOL! The fuckwit 'justifcation' was laughable, and that's when I quit reading this rancid pile of entrails because it was so badly-written.

This story failed in many ways, but primarily because it's eactly like all other such stories. There's nothing new here, nothing original, and nothing even remotely different to every other werewolf story ever told. So why read it?! In other genres, we have vampires that behave exactly like humans, or in another, we have ghosts that behave just like regular people. I even read a plot for one ghost story that was a murder mystery where someone was going around killing ghosts. I'm like, wait a minute, aren't ghosts already dead? What's that all about? LOL!

It's a bit ridiculous. As I said, there's nothing alien or supernatural about the people on this story, so why even make the characters werewolves at all? It wasn't worth any more of my time, especially since I was then able to quickly move on and find two books in succession that truly were worth reading. I would not have done this had I forced myself to continue reading something that was boring and cringe-worthy.

Lost Library by Kate Baray

Rating: WARTY!

My mistake with this book - yet another dumb-ass YA series starter - was to fail to pay attention to the word 'quirky' in the book description. That word is almost always a warning that the novel will be garbage. So, my bad.

The next problem is that the main male character is called 'John'. This is almost as bad as 'Jack', the most over-used action character name ever - and is a sure sign that this book is to be avoided. I don't even recall how this came into my collection. It was just there and I'd evidently begun to read it some time ago, but when I dug back into it I realized why I hadn't continued past chapter six: it was so bad.

Another problem is that this is a shifter book, and with one or two very rare exceptions, I'm not really a fan of those at all. Contingent with this problem is that he's not called a werewolf, but a lycan. This is the same chickenshit approach that you see in fantasy books where the fairies are called fae because the author is too big of a coward to call them what they are. "It might lose me some sales!" Fuck the sales. Tell a story! Write a good novel, for pete's sake!

I read only enough to know this was bad and not worth my time. Other negative reviewers I subsequently discovered have derided the novel as boring, with which I agree, derivative, with which I also agree, and formulaic, with which I also agree! Most shifter books are though, so this is nothing new; the authors of these novels are a very incestuous community. One reviewer mentioned that the main charcter, Lizzie Smith, is a Mary Sue, which is never good.

One reviewer mentioned that the central premise of the novel - which from the description, is that John arrives at Lizzie's house looking for a magical book of power - is quickly shelved in favor of the main female fan-girling over the werewolf. I encountered this as soon as I began re-reading in chapter six, and read: "why was she acting like a crushing teen." Well, it's because the idiot author wrote her that way, duhh!

I about barfed at that and quit reading right there because I could see precisely where this story was going - into the garbage as most of these werewolf stories, all of which are evidently about women who are ovulating - do. There's nothing worse than reading about an alpha male and a bitch in heat, which is typically all that these stories are. Wish-fulfilment much? I'm done with this book and this author. Next please, right this way.

Bloodfire by Helen Harper

Rating: WARTY!

I should say up front that I am not a fan of werewolf or vampire stories, or any of that kind of thing. I've read a few and I've been almost consistently disappointed in them because they're so tedious and so conformal. I know many readers enjoy predictable by-rote stories that retread familiar territory, but I've never been one of those; hence my aversion to series. I quickly tire of reading the same thing over and over again. I prefer authors who do not take the road most traveled.

Initially that's what appealed to me about this story because the author seemed like maybe she was going my way. Yes, she still had the ludricous idea of a pack and an alpha male and all that shit, but this pack had a human member, and although she was a little weird, she was not a shifter. This created problems when trouble arose and the "Lord Alpha" came to visit the local pack. It sounded interesting.

In the British Isles, at least as far as the mainland is concerned, Cornwall is about as far south as you can get, but for me, this is when the story itself started going south. It didn't help that the author seems clueless that Cornwall does indeed get Earthquakes - about one every other year or so. But with regard to the story, I hear you objecting that these are wolves. Wolves live in packs! There's an alpha male. Why is this wrong? Well, it actually is wrong!

Among real wolves, there is not a lone alpha male; there's an alpha couple. This couple does all or most of the breeding, so pretty much all of the pack is related. Despite this, everyone else, while a part of the pack and deriving certain benefits from that, is pretty much out for his or herself, trying to rise up the hierarchy, and packs are not set in stone. Nor are they all best friends all the time. They wil band together to protect their turf, but within the pack, which can number from two to thirty or so wolves, levels of aggression can rise and fall, and pack members can leave and start their own pack.

But there is no Lord Alpha Male (LAM for short! LOL!). Now werewolves are supposed to be different, but for some reason this pack identifty has taken over the mythology and everyone has bought into it. I have no idea why. And the leader is called 'Lord'? Seriously? What is this? Star Wars? It's the same with vampire stories and it turns me right off them.

This story had the makings of an engaging one, but the more I read, the more humdrum and the less compelling of a read it became. Mackenzie, the main character, was first person voice and this is usually a mistake. I managed to read it, but every time she said "I blah blah blah...", and "Hey lookit me!" and "It's all about me!" and "Check out what I did next!" it reminded me this was a story, and I couldn't get lost in it. "Listen to me" is a great Buddy Holly song. It makes for a sucky narration voice.

Anyway, the pack took her in as a child and no one told her why, but because she's been there so long, she's considered by most to be a pack member, even though she doesn't behave like one herself: she's constantly off following hunches without asking permission or sharing what she knows. So much for the pack! Naturally there's the "school bully" which again turned me off. Of course, she has a special snowflake power which is at the root of the story, but when we finally got around to addressing that, the ending was really rather flat and unsatisfying to me, and predictably, she goes rogue. No surprises there.

The introduction of Lord Corrigan, the national alpha male turned me right off yet again, because he's clearly this macho studly teasing flirtatious dominant male. Even as he curses Mackenzie for insolence, he inexplicably lets her get away with anything she wants to do, and he's simultaneously so weak, useless, and stupid, that he cannot even tell shes not a shifter much less a werewolf. So much for his vaunted powers.

At least the author doesn't call them lycans, I guess, so there's that. Calling werewovles 'lycans' just to try and sound special is as pathetic as calling fairies 'fae'. It's chickenshit and authors should be ashamed of it. But, anyway, if he's the capo dei capi, that doesn't automatically make him the capo di tutti i capi, because presumably there are other packs in other nations.

That's one problem with this story - the world-building just isn't there. Naturally no one - least of all me - wants a story bogged-down with backstory, but it doesn't hurt to toss in a line here and there filling in some detail during the course of telling the story. Instead, we get a vague hand-wave about this local pack, considered by the human residents to be a cult, and yet no one finds this odd? MI5, which is the Brit equivalent of the FBI, has no interest at all in this nationwide network of cults? Really? Had this been set in 1820, fine, but in 2020 with terrorism embedded in the landscape it doesn't work.

There's a central authority pack in London, we learn. Why London? If these wolves despise humans as much as they clearly do according to this novel, then why emulate us at all? For that matter, if they're so superior, or think they are, why even tolerate us? Why not wipe us out? Why even use human names and descriptions for themselves? Like I said, 'lycan' is blessedly avoided, but werewolf is still used. It makes no sense to me, yet it's one of those things readers are expected to just let slide.

We're told nothing about how the wolves make a living or pay for food - or even what food they eat, apart from vague allusions to someone's bad cooking. But why do they even cook their food? I'll tell you why. It's because the author wasn't writing about werewolves any more than one-trick pony author Stephenie Meyer was writing about vampires. They're both writing about humans with a gossamer-thin patina of urban fantasy sprinkled over it.

Does this sound like a litany of nitpicking? Too bad! For me a story either works or it doesn't. When a female author perpetuates this nonsense: "much in the same way that women’s periods aligned themselves if they lived together in close quarters for a long time," it's more than nit-picking, because that menses alignment? It doesn't happen! Like werewolves, it's a myth. Real nitpicking would be to mention that when using the app in night mode, the chapters are so pale against the background that it's hard to read them, or pointing out that when the author writes, "you tended to become somewhat inure to nature’s most reliable outcome" she really should have used 'inured'.

Real problems with writing are what turn me off a book. If it's entertaining enough and delivers a good story I can put up with a lot of issues, but if you, as a reader, are constantly pulled out of it by poor writing choices and shoddy or inconsistent world-building, and disappointed by a flat ending, it's not worth reading the story at all, and this one makes me wish I could have the time back so I could have read something else instead.

Weregirl by CD Bell

Rating: WARTY!

I'm not a fan of werewolf or vampire stories. The first because that genre has never actually interested me, and the second because vampires have become so larded with trope and cliché that they've become nauseatingly bland and ridiculously pathetic. This one was different in that first of all, the blurb writer got my interest, which is almost a miracle in itself, and the secondly, that the author made the story worth reading - as far as it went.

Note that the cover calls this a novel, but all I read was actually a novella (I'm guessing, without knowing the word-count). But you know, if Amazon is going to continue trying to force writers to sell novels at 99 cents a pop, like they involve no more work than a two or three minute song does, I don't blame authors for putting out shorter stories, or for releasing them the way they used to be released in the days of Arthur Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes stories: in episodic form. This one was not such a novel however. It was, as I learned after I had requested it, merely an introductory 100 pages from a four-hundred page novel, so the publishers actually made me DNF this! This review, therefore, is only of those first 100 pages.

The first thing I liked is that this wasn't told in first person. I'm tempted to build a shrine to author CD Bell for that. It would have been very easy to make that mistake and the fact that this author didn't is highly praise-worthy. The second good thing was the two main characters: Nessa and Bree, who were for me completely real and believable.

Nessa Kurland is a high school junior who is very much into cross-country running. She not only loves it, she needs it if she's to get a scholarship for college. While running one evening, she's bitten by a wolf, and over the next month she finds herself changing at first subtly, and then more scarily, until she can't deny that something embarrassingly and frighteningly weird has happened to her. Fortunately, Bree is a true friend and she begins to work with Nessa on handling this.

The story felt too thin. For a short story this would have been understandable, but for a four-hundred page novel, it's inexcusable. By 'thin' I mean there was not a lot of depth to it. It's written it like it's a first draft, getting all the essential elements down without adding any real atmosphere. I would like to have seen it a lot more fleshed-out, and by that I don't mean padding (which it evidently has if it's four hundred pages and is this skimpy), but filling in spare areas with some color and texture. The story also has a prolog which I skipped as I do all prologs. I've never regretted not reading one, nor missed it! If you don't think it's important enough to tell in chapter one or later, then I don't think it's worth reading!

For an example of the failure to flesh out, consider one of Nessa's fellow runners - a girl named Cynthia. Nessa is supposed to train with her one evening, but they miss their connection, and despite Nessa's wolf bite injury, there's nothing from Cynthia: no asking why she had not shown up on time the previous night, or asking after her health. There were several people I suspected of being the werewolf, but my prime suspect was this Cynthia, notwithstanding Nessa's inexplicable conviction that the werewolf was male.

Another such area is where Nessa wins a race but instead of hanging around at the end, she keeps running and disappears completely. There was a good reason for this, but there was no follow up to it. Any real event like that, where the record-breaking winner disappears afterwards, would caused a lot of suspicion! Maybe it wasn't Nessa, but someone else running, fraudulently pretending to be her? I can't go more into detail over this without giving away too many spoilers but this event was simply glossed over, as though there was nothing weird about it. Reality would have brought dire consequences: an investigation at the very least.

This was an advance review copy, and there were some grammatical problems with it, which I assume will be cleaned-up before actual release. There were some cases of a word missing from between two other words such as, for example, "The tooth from the wound" which should have presumably been: "The tooth came from the wound." Another was a case where 'here' was used when 'her' was meant. That's a really hard one to catch with a spellchecker! I normally list the errors I find in ARCs on my blog so an author can make use of the information if they wish, but Bluefire reader, on which I read this and which is otherwise an excellent app, makes it impossible to capture these errors. A final read-through will fix them though.

There were also occasional odd sentences, such as when Nessa walks by a garage and she can see "...a Toyota of some kind..." which sounded really strange. I think the author intended this to mean she recognized the make but not the model, but even if you don't know the model you can identify it as a car or a truck or an SUV or whatever. I think I would have just had it that she saw a Toyota pick-up or whatever it was. Or simply kept it completely neutral and said "...an SUV on a hydraulic lift..." or something along those lines. But that's just me! I also found it odd that it's copyrighted to Chooseco LLC rather than to CD Bell, but whatever!

When Nessa meets the 'shaman', the story lost a little something for me, not least because he was disgustingly racist. Also because he was precisely the trope male which turns me off these stories: chiseled muscles and so on. I thought at this point, "Nessa deserves a better dog kennel than the one that's being built for her here if this is to be her romantic interest!" Why this trope came to be associated with werewolves, which are not larded with bulky muscles (far from it!), is a mystery. It was also odd that Nessa feels, along with other physical improvements in stamina, hearing, and smell, her eyesight becoming acute. Dogs, including wolves (or conversely, wolves including dogs!), do not have great eyesight. They're most likely short-sighted, and are largely color-blind compared with humans. They do see better at night, and the reason they do is connected with their poor color vision.

It makes no sense for Nessa's sight to undergo the improvements it did. It should have become worse, except at night. You can argue that since she was hyperopic beforehand, then becoming more myopic could have corrected her vision, I guess, but that's a bit of a stretch. Wolves have a wider field of view, but poorer binocular vision than humans. So this super-powered vision is a trope which has no honest place in the cannon, although it has actually become cannon for this kind of tale. This random, nonsensical approach to telling werewolf stories is one of the reasons I'm not attracted to the genre. It's far too deus ex machina for someone like me, who thinks it would be nice if a potential writer of werewolf stories actually read-up on real wolves before they began their story instead of soaking their pages in the tainted water which they've blindly hauled-up from the well of trope that's been established by far too many YA authors of late.

So overall, based on one quarter of a novel, I can't recommend this. It started out great and drew me in, but as the story sailed on, particularly when the "shaman' appeared, it began to take on trope like a badly-holed ship takes on water, and this sunk the story for me! I don't any to read four hundred pages of this, and I can't recommend it based on what the publisher allowed me to read of it.

The Lost Souls Dating Agency by Suneeti Rekhari

Title: The Lost Souls Dating Agency
Author: Suneeti Rekhari
Publisher: Escape Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!

There is a tiny prologue which I skipped as I do all prologues. If the author doesn’t think it worth putting into chapter one or later, I don’t think it’s worth reading. This is also a first person PoV novel which I normally detest because it’s all "Me!" all the time which is irritating at best. Some authors can make it work, but for most authors, it’s best avoided like the plague. This author makes it work. The story is short - only a hundred-fifty pages or so - divided into forty chapters, yet! The text is pretty densely packed, but it's a fast read.

What drew me to this novel was that the author was not another in a long line of US authors who think the US is the only place worth writing about! She's not US at all, but is of Indian descent and is resident in Melbourne, Australia. The main character, Shalini Gupta, is of Indian descent and is resident in Melbourne, Australia.... The novel flits very briefly from India to Dubai, and then on to Melbourne where Shalini now lives, attending college, while her uncle (not really - he adopted her and told her he was her uncle) remains in Dubai; then he goes missing!

My attraction to the novel in this case didn’t fail me. I loved the simple, matter-of-fact way it was written, and the perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek acceptance of the paranormal by Shalini and her two friends Neha and Megan. Not only has Shalini inherited some money from her uncle, she has also inherited a mysterious empty warehouse which actually isn't far from her apartment. The warehouse is old and run-down, but she feels compelled to clean it up. The only thing in there is a weird clock which is immovably attached to one of the walls. And the time is wrong.

As she's trying to figure out what to do with the place, a newspaper begins mysteriously appearing in he building each Saturday. Shalini quickly realizes that this is a supernatural newspaper, and she posts an ad in it advertising the warehouse as a dating agency for supernatural beings! Her first client soon shows up: Victor the cranky vampire. This part was hilarious. In fact the whole Victor thing is really amusing. Get this, for example (and keep in mind that Victor's a vampire):

'Bloody hell, Victor, you scared me! It’s daytime! How are you here?'
'I drove.'

I laughed out loud at that. Note the single quotes which Brit and Aussie novels tend to sport to demarcate speech. They look weird to me, and I grew up in Britain! Anyway, no more spoilers. Shalini takes on three cases, and gets deeper into the supernatural than ever she feels safe doing, but she meets some startling and interesting people along the way.

Be warned that this has a cliffhanger ending - it's obviously the start of a series, and I'm typically not a fan of series, but I'm not averse to reading more of this one!