Book Review: Harmony Black by Craig Schaefer

Amazon Prime recommended this one to me (how Amazon manages to recommend anything to me given the weird and random things I buy is really beyond my algorithmic abilities), and for once the interwebs read me correctly.

Harmony Black by Craig Schaefer was completely worth the time. I loved this book enough to read it in a night, losing sleep to find out what happened. 

If you know anything about me at all, that's just about the highest praise I can give a story: I am excessively protective of my sleep. The premise alone was enough to hook my interest: FBI agent recruited somewhat against her will into a secret black project government branch that investigates and eliminates paranormal threats, because she's a Witch.

I like paranormal fiction. I like well written, fast paced, fleshed-out paranormal fiction that has a surprise or two...and oh, the characterization of Harmony's personal demons, along with the rest of her team's quirks, kept me entertained for the whole story. Since this is the beginning of a new spinoff series by Schaefer, the story surrounds the initial case bringing Harmony's new Scooby team together. The timeline skips from her recruitment, in which she specifies she works alone, thanks, to her long-needed vacation after bagging some major case monster in Vegas. But we've all watched enough cop shows to know vacation is NEVER uninterrupted, and she's ordered to break her "lone-wolf" rule by joining some elite super-secret monster hunting squad: to catch and kill the Boogeyman. 

I appreciate that this book is truly a monster-hunting story. The ethical conflicts between expediency of removing a (literally) monstrous threat to the public versus following procedure seems boring when written in a sentence, but as a conflict for the main characters it's what brings a measure of reality into a universe where demonic bounty hunters from Hell are competing with the FBI to catch a creature stealing babies. 

Yup, I just wrote that sentence. 

And, because I not only wrote that sentence but thoroughly enjoyed the book that drove me to write it, I'll be reading the sequel(s) as they come out.