HARD MAGIC: Book One Paranormal Scene Investigations - Laura Anne Gilman

From the back of the book: Welcome to PUPI: Private, Unaffiliated, Paranormal Investigations

A handpicked team trained to solve crimes the regular police can't touch---crimes of magic.

My name's Bonnie Torres. Recent college grad, magic user and severely unemployed. Until I got a call out of nowhere to interview for a job I hadn't applied for. It smelled fishy, but the brutal truth was I needed the work---so off I went.

Two days later I'm a PUPI--me and Nick, Sharon, Nifty and Pietr. Five twentysomethings, thrown into an entirely new career in forensic magic.

The first job we get is a doozy: proving that the deaths of two Talents were murder, not suicide. Worse, there are high-profile people who want us to close up shop and go away. We're sniffing out things they'd rather keep buried.

Looks as if this job is gonna get interesting. The only problem is, we're making it up as we go along.....

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HARD MAGIC is a highly cool mixture of what it would be like watching a hybrid episode of CSI and Supernatural.

This newly minted team is given the task of investigating crimes against magic-using beings by using magic. Magic users are called Talents and use the current, or magical energy, that flows through all things. This can cause issue since it runs along-side electrical current and the two don't exactly get along. Think disposable cell phones a must.

There's also the issue of the two types of Talent, the Council and the Lonejacks. Council is the sort of governing group of the magic users and the Lonejacks are the loners, non-team players. The two types of Talent don't always get along. And the team is made up of Lonejacks and the people reluctantly coming to ask for help are Council. Oil and water.

There are people trying to stop the team's investigation and formation. Dangerous people using magic and non-magic means to stop them.

I think what I enjoyed the most was how the magic use was explained as rather non-mystical. It's explained as a fact of life and as real as science.

I look forward to the rest of this series and, really, anything Laura Anne Gilman writes. I've read STAYING DEAD: The Retrievers Book One in the past (http://iyamvixenbooks.blogspot.com/2009/09/staying-dead-retrievers-book-1-laura.html) and highly enjoyed it. I can definitely recommend both series based on just the first book in each one.

http://www.lauraannegilman.net/blog/

Five highly excellent Talent beans.....