I think of Cherie Priest as a clockpunk/steampunk author with cool alternate frontier US history books (start with Boneshaker). However when I saw she had a contemporary Seattle murder mystery pairing a cop with a slightly psychic travel agent– I was in.
As the cover promises, this is light fare. Oh yes of course folks die, but there is also klairvoyant karaoke. There’s a cop putting his career on the line by dragging Leda around to active crime scenes, but he’s not grizzled (and there’s no romantic spark, to my sadness).
Mostly Leda is a flighty, amusing, mess of a woman trying to move on from the death of her finacee by helping a cop solve a different case. There’s witness interviews where she gets only sometimes helpful little flashes of insight, much more page time spent in the bar where she and her friend hang out, and a little bit of Grady parenting a teen from afar.
Fun little escapist series. The ending reveal was a bit over-the-top in terms of goofiness and showmanship, but as I said, this is an escapist series 🙂
What I Should Have Said 