Friday, November 7, 2008

Unclean Spirits-M.L.N. Hanover

Unclean Spirits
M.L.N. Hanover
Pocket, Dec 2008, $15.00
ISBN: 9781416575979

Like most young people, Jayne Heller has a full life between going to college and having a boyfriend. However, her normalcy is shattered forever when someone murders her Uncle Eric. Jayne closes his estate as his prime heir, but is unable to obtain emotional closure as she cannot understand why an uncle she hardly knows left her his estate and why he was killed; she already knows Randolph Coin of something called the Invisible College where the research is solely on demonic spirits conversion into sources of incredible power.

Obsessed Jayne is determined to avenge her uncle’s murder. Several of Eric’s friends and associates help her as they too want the killer brought to justice though their definition strongly differs from that of Jayne. However, as she explores Uncle Eric’s weird world she begins to meet a horde of Hollywood mythical “UNCLEAN SPIRITS” who rock her physics based realism off its foundation as she wonders can this be Denver and keeps reminding herself this can’t happen to Jayne.

This engaging urban fantasy amateur sleuth is more a character study than a whodunit as the intelligent technologically astute heroine is clearly out of her element with her former belief that demons are in games, movies and urban fantasies not the streets of Denver. Although Jayne’s adept skill at fighting otherworldly monsters seems over the top of the Rocky Mountains even with her late uncle’s “blessing”, fans will enjoy learning alongside the heroine the rules of para-physics in the realm of the “Black Sun's Daughter”.

Harriet Klausner

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