When I finished Boundary Crossed and the sequels in 2017, I enjoyed them enough to put Melissa F. Olson’s other books on my ever expanding to-read list. Last year, I randomly choose Midnight Curse to read and finally got to it this year–not realizing that it’s actually the second Scarlett Bernard series. Dead Spots is the first (even before Boundary Crossed actually).

It doesn’t actually matter that much, at least so far, but there are a number of references to previous events that I expect I would already know about. So it goes. It’s actually kind of nice not to go through Scarlett first finding out about the Old World and getting acclimated and just start out in the middle of everything. Plus, having the protagonist that basically cleans up messes and neutralizes anyone else in the Old World is pretty cool. Also, she’s wonderfully snarky.

Later, some of her accusers would argue that her actions were a treacherous betrayal of her own kind. They insisted that she should have challenged him to an honorable fight. But she didn’t care about being honorable. She cared about him being dead.

And pop culture aware:

“Then go away, or I shall taunt you a second time,” I said in my best French accent.

Those are both in the first 2% of the book.

Worldbuilding, the focus on Werewolves, Vampires, and Witches (and nulls) being the big 3 supernatural powers, without everything under the sun is actually kind of nice. Scarlett being human–but with the power to bring supernatural baddies down to her level–is an interesting twist I don’t think I’ve seen otherwhere and being backed up by a giant ugly dog (actually a bargest, not something we see that often) is fun. Setting the story in LA is already interesting, and having that be the one place in the world where the Old World lives mostly in harmony is a cool setting.

But the pressure on us was still huge. Los Angeles is the only city in America where all three supernatural powers share power and live more or less in peace. If we fucked that up, there would be a lot of repercussions, which could include anything from snide “I told you so”s to violent attempts to take over our city.

Plotwise, saving the vampire former best friend from getting framed for multiple murder while still trying to play within the rules is solid enough. Nothing hugely surprising, but a fun read nevertheless. This whole collection of series may just have to join my periodic re-read list.

Random note:

Prologue

It had helped that she knew exactly how the whores would react.

Well. They say that you need a hook for a first line to get people into your book. Of all the first lines I’ve read … that’s certainly one of them.