The Ghoul Vendetta

The Ghoul Vendetta (2017) Lisa Shearin

I adore this series. It’s so fun and enjoyable–despite all the ghouls and monsters.

The nephew of a vampire lord is kidnapped at an elite yacht party Mac is attending with Rake (the wealthy goblin businessman and dark mage she’s sort-of dating, but still isn’t sure about.). This is followed by ghouls breaking into secured bank vaults, stealing a select few items, and then eating the guards. Needless to say this is a nightmare for the PR people who are supposed to keep the supernatural world under wraps, and thus the case becomes a priority for SPI.

Unfortunately, the leader of the ghouls turns out to be a monster who has been haunting Mac’s partner Ian, which makes things more complicated, since as the only seer for NY SPI, Ian is as much Mac’s bodyguard as partner. Mac has useful skills, but those skills don’t include extreme weapons abilities or defensive abilities.

I appreciated Ian’s training efforts in that area as well as hand-to-hand combat, but I’d pretty much gotten as good as I was going to get, though I kept trying, and Ian kept teaching.

That last bit is one of the things I adore about Mac and this series. She’s SENSIBLE.

All that being said, I had a gun, I’d been trained, and I almost had the confidence to use it. Though suddenly, I went from having one target to what SPI’s shooting instructor called a “target-rich environment.”

You didn’t walk into a dark hole in the ground unless you were qualified to handle what you found— or what found you. Anyone other than a seasoned battle mage would be woefully— and fatally— unqualified.

We got the hell out.

One of the other things I love is the thought that went into the world-building.

She’d begun her career as a midwife, and had become the first licensed female doctor in the city. Every few decades, she “retired” from one position and took another. She’d been in her mid-twenties when she’d been turned so she didn’t stand out when she went back to school after a “retirement” to catch up on the latest medical advances. She’d learned to glamour and glamour well. As a result, she’d never had problems blending in or with being found out.

Vivienne Sagadraco had a lot of pull in this town, and one of the ways she used it was getting supernaturals placed in strategic jobs. In addition to supernaturals in the NYPD, there were mages who, like Dr. Van Daal, could place a glamour on a dead supernatural and hold it there until the body was turned over to the family. Or if no one claimed the body, until it was cremated or buried by the city. These mages were in homicide divisions, the medical examiner’s office, and CSI teams.

(T)he Prime Bank was founded by and largely caters to supernaturals. When one has an extended lifespan, it’s less awkward and more convenient to bank where you don’t have to pretend to die every ninety years.

As a psychometric, Dr. Tierney got psychic vibes from objects, even furniture, especially antique furniture. As a psychiatrist, he needed to keep his concentration on his patients. That explained why all of his office furniture came from Ikea. He even assembled it himself so that the frustration of the people who had to put it together didn’t sink into the wood and fabric.

Those are the little touches that delight me when I come across them in a story.

Plus, I love bits like this:

“We have other agents who are just as qualified—”
“Name one,” Ian snarled.
“Every senior agent in the bull pen.”

That’s perfect.

Plus, there’s a great scene when they’re in the restricted archives, and she describes the reaction to the archivists to someone touching an old document.

I really love this series and am already waiting impatiently for the next installment.
Rating: 9/10

Published by Ace

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