UNHOLY MAGIC

Author: Stacia Kane ISBN: 9780345515582 7/2010 URBAN FANTASY Publisher: DEL-REY

ENEMIES DON’T NEED TO BE ALIVE TO BE DEADLY.   For Chess Putnam, finding herself near-fatally poisoned by a con psychic and then stopping a murderous ghost is just another day on the job. As an agent of the Church of Real Truth, Chess must expose those looking to profit from the world’s unpleasant little poltergeist problem—humans filing false claims of hauntings—all while staving off any undead who really are looking for a kill. But Chess has been extra busy these days, coping with a new “celebrity” assignment while trying on her own time to help some desperate prostitutes. Someone’s taking out the hookers of Downside in the most gruesome way, and Chess is sure the rumors that it’s the work of a ghost are way off base. But proving herself right means walking in the path of a maniac, not to mention standing between the two men in her life just as they—along with their ruthless employers—are moving closer to a catastrophic showdown. Someone is dealing in murder, sex, and the supernatural, and once again Chess finds herself right in the crossfire.

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

The second installment in Kane's Downside series has Chess dealing with a movie star's haunting, dead hookers and rising emotions in her once emotion-free world.  As in the first book, UNHOLY GHOSTS, nothing is what it seems, and everyone is playing a deep-deep game.

For Chess the book starts out badly—an undercover mission gone awry—and only continues to go downhill at alarming speeds.  Her 'official' job as a Debunker for the Church of Truth is to check out a famous client's claims of a haunting at his new pad.  The job doesn't seem kosher from the get go; the man is rich, the family is tense, and what Chess is seeing is not adding up with what she's feeling.  Her 'unofficial' job (to keep herself sailing happily in a drug haze) as Bump's go-to hauntings gal is to find out if a ghost is killing his people off in gruesome ways.

Just for fun, she also gets the same gig from her "not really a boyfriend, just a sleeping partner" Lex, except it's for his gang's people.  And of course, her tentative friendship-slash-flirting game with Terrible—Bump's enforcer—is taking new, decidedly murky, turns.

Some days it doesn't pay to get out of bed.

If you enjoyed the first book, then you'll enjoy this one.  Content warnings aside—a whole lot of cussing, name calling, and inventive phrases you don't want your family to know you've read, saturate this book—Chess is just this side of suicidal most of the book.  If it's not her official job giving her stress, it's her unofficial one; or her relationship with Lex; or her could-have-been with Terrible.  If possible she hits the drugs harder in this book than in UNHOLY GHOSTS.

That's what I like about this series, though.  Not that I condone drug-use, but Kane has crafted a main character with more negatives than positives, but who still is likable and engaging to read about.  The world we see is not shiny or peaceful or clean; it's filthy, populated with people who benefit off human weakness and policed by a group in power because our dead won't stay dead.  The 'good times' that Chess have are few and far between and are usually of small things: seeing the ocean for the first time, listening to music loud enough to bust an eardrum. 

My only real complaint is that near the end, when all the story lines converge and fuse together, a whole lot gets more confusing.  Motives, for one thing.  When some truths are revealed about the hooker storyline, the haunting storyline rears its head and slaps the hooker storyline down for a few too many pages. 

The third book, CITY OF GHOSTS, is due out very soon, and if the snippet in the back of UNHOLY MAGIC is any indication, some plot-chicks come to roost in a horrifying way.

Alexandra Cenni