Review brought to you by OBS staff member Verushka

On first glance from the cover, this seems to be a relatively run-of-the-mill underworld fantasy, but I have never known a book to have such a misleading cover before. Sophie, our heroine is exactly the opposite of the woman in the cover, in fact.  Sophie is the only human who works as an executive assistant to the kindly werewolf head of the Underworld Detection Agency, Mr Sampson. Think of the agency as underworld bureaucracy in one place. Her best friend is Nina, a vampire with a fantastic  fashion sense, and a visting nephew who favors Dracula novels – I’m just glad he doesn’t rename himself Edward. Sophie comes from a long-line of seers, and is waiting and half hoping her powers, beyond being immune to all sorts of magic, are going to come through some time soon.  Said seer-past through her grandmother and bullies at school adds a huge dollop of angst and bullying in her past during her teen years which obviously, and rightly so, still affects her. The main case of this book revolves around a series of gruesome murders, that send the cops, the normal “breathers”, to the UDA for help. Mr Sampson assigns her to work with a human cop, Parker Hayes, and from there the two create a funny, well-written book, with a few nagging flaws that affected my enjoyment of this book, and Sophie in particular.

The writing in his book reminds me of Laura Resnick’s hilariously funny Esther Diamond series. But whereas Resnick has some wonderful comic timing, and knows when to scale back on Esther’s quirks, Jayne does not. Her attempt at humor via Sophie and her oversexed CSI daydreams of toting guns and getting into bed with Hayes is tiring and loses its appeal quick. There’s a sophistication about Resnick’s writing that had me laughing out loud when I read the Esther Diamond novels, and in comparison Jayne’s humor, a substantial part of Sophie’s make-up and the book – suffers for it.

I will say there is some recognizable character progression, or so I assume, as such inane thoughts are eventually toned down as Sophie gains control of herself around Parker.  I’m just not certain that in the next book, Sophie won’t go into descend into daydreams of sex, violence, CSI and Parker Hayes in order to re-establish the characters and their relationships in Book 2. And the reason I’m assuming this is likely and hoping not, is that Parker Hayes has an interesting, if clichéd secret of his own that keeps him disappearing and an inconsistent presence in Sophie’s life despite their feelings for each other.

The case Sophie finds herself embroiled in is excellently thought out and engaging from beginning to end. Sophie’s “quirks” are just so trying of my patience – I can appreciate a woman appreciate a gorgeous guy, but Jayne loses the knack of that in her attempts to be funny. Nina and her nephew Vlad/Louis provide  good support characters, but the tragedy in this book is that Mr Sampson, Sophie’s boss, who is important for her, and only her, to worry about for the whole book, is disposed offscreen, with barely a mention. It’s frustrating, because the book establishes that Mr Sampson meant something important to Sophie, but we never really know why, other than he’s hot. These are the odds and ends of the story that are frustrating in that they hint at a wonderful untold story, the author didn’t bother with because Sophie and Parker Hayes suddenly took centre stage. The imbalance is striking and does take away from the book as a whole. That said it’s a first novel and was engaging enough for me to keep an eye out for the next one, but I still can’t decide if I’ll be racing to pick it up.