staying dead, by laura anne gilman
A fun romance, with modernday magic
(Review posted 13 Aug 2006 18:11:35)

The nominal premise of this book is that the world is just like the real world, except that magic (which its practitioners call "current" and which is sort of related to electricity) works (in a very lawlike and mostly non-mystical way), and our protagonists (one a current-using Talent and one an ordinary Null) are smart urban professionals who get things back (it's "A Retrievers Novel", the covers tells us) using magic and general cleverness, for money. And there's an old murder, and a ghost, and a bad-guy, and interesting sidelights on how seductive it is to just slide into the Current and go (basically) mad.

But really the book is a love story, between our protagonists Wren and Sergei, who have been working together for years and never quite noticed that they're in love. All around it's light and well-written and fun to read. The teaser for the next book in the series, at the back, says "now that she and Sergie are in a relationship, things are getting much more complicated". Which doesn't sound nearly as much fun *8) but maybe I'll read it someday anyway.

(Also all the text is in a sans-serif font, and the cover is entirely lowercase. Very trendy. But harder on the eyes than a real font would have been...)