Melissa F Olson has become one of my favorite urban fantasy authors as of late. I first learned of her thanks to my Amazon Prime subscription and its Kindle First program where you get to try one pre-order book a month for free. In my case, I tried one of her other books, Boundary Crossed, and liked it enough that I wanted to know more. Book two of that series just came out recently, so I went looking for something else and found one of her other books named Dead Spots.
I wasn’t Disappointed.
Dead Spots is another urban fantasy series where witches, werewolves, and vampires take center stage, even if the old world is working hard to keep it a secret. The book starts out with a bang, with Scarlet Bernard waking up after a late night with Eli, a werewolf who happens to be an off-again, on-again fling for Scarlet.
She gets a call from Kristen, the leader of the witches in LA, to fix a problem some of her underlings have caused. While she takes care of that, a gruesome triple murder happens across town, putting here in a bad situation where she has to clean up the scene in record time.
Needless to say, she fails, which puts her in the cross-hairs of LAPD Officer Jesse Cruz, who promises to keep her out of jail as long as she agrees to cooperate with the investigation. The only problem with that deal is that it goes against another deal made with Dashiell, the city’s lead vampire. She has to go with, and against, these conflicting sides to keep everyone, other than those truly responsible, in the clear.
Scarlet is unique in the world of urban fantasy in that she is a null. A null is a being whose sole power is to negate the abilities of others. That means around her, vampires return to life, wolves shift back to human form, and magic ceases to exist. That means she has to be careful about what she does and where she goes, lest she risk angering a being who doesn’t want his power stripped away.
This series revolves around a typical love triangle between Eli and eventually Jesse. Needless to say, putting the two men against each other has issues of its own, least of which being that Scarlet seems like she isn’t ready for a relationship.
Overall, I enjoyed the story, and have since read the other two books in the series. From what I’ve seen, her books take place in the same world, so once you learn how things work in one book, they continue to work that way for the others.
Dead spots will run you $4.99 if you want to give it a try. Those with Kindle Unlimited subscriptions can get the whole series for free.