This book features Jaime Vegas, a necromancer/fake spiritualist that's been mentioned in other books in the series. In this book, she's one of three spiritualists working on a "reality" special in which they are supposed to communicate with dead semi-famous people, working their way up to Marilyn Monroe. Jaime's hoping to snag her own TV show out of this, mainly to show up her godawful (stage) mother. However, since Jaime has actual talent (she fakes things during her stage shows because the reality would freak people out), she's quite aware of the ghost problem out in the garden. She's dealt with nontraditional ghosts before, but while she can feel these ghosts, she can't communicate with them...and they seem to be children, which normally don't end up as ghosts. Clearly, something's gone wrong here.
In need of assistance from the other side, Jaime is eventually able to recruit her friend Eve from Haunted, as well as her boyfriend Kristof, to help her investigate. On the still-living side, Jeremy the werewolf (otherwise known as the guy Jaime has had a big drooly crush on for four years) and Hope Adams, a tabloid reporter with a sense for chaos, help her do research.
In this world, only supernaturals can do magic, period, full stop, and any human who manages to do it probably has some supernatural blood. But a demon who offers assistance (without asking for anything, HMMMM?) suggests that evolution has something to do with it. Either some supernatural species that missed the evolutionary boat still has some ability lurking within their genes...or humans have evolved enough to do magic. (The title of this book is purely ironic.) So Jaime, Eve, and Jeremy go on the trail of what humans might be trying to do serious magic by doing brutal things to others.
This is a good book, though I am oddly not quite as excited by it as I have been by most books in the series. (I don't know why, considering that I love Jaime as a character, have been looking forward to this book for a long time, and was delighted that Jeremy was in this as well.) I can't pinpoint why, since it's well-done. Possibly it was because I wasn't all that into the TV show plot, which just kind of comes off a bit flatter than the rest of it.
An interesting point that's made in this book is that Jaime's a pretty different character from everyone else in the series. She's "older" (well, not older than Jeremy, but she's not a 20 or 30something) and frankly, unable to go around beating people up with brute force or magical spells. She has to get rescued a lot and HATES it, and hanging around with werewolves and a badass ghost with major power and having to be babysat by a half-demon kind of rubs it in to her. (It's quite amusing when Eve lectures Jaime about the importance of wearing sneakers...and later Jaime finds they're not all they're cracked up to be.) It's lovely to see her finally figure out a way to turn her own powers to her advantage without becoming the damsel once again.
Plus, there's Jeremy. Hubba hubba :)
It's a good book, and I'll be giving it four stars.
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