"enchanting paranormal mystery"

Karma Marx is an otherworldly being who is half polster and half human. She is faster than mortals, able to hide in the shadows, and is working off a punishment for accidentally killing her best friend as a young child because she didn't know her own powers. She is a transmortis anomaly extermination which means she cleans the homes of otherworldly beings and usually ends up bringing them into her own home.

The Akashial League which oversees her punishment has her foster young polter child Pixie for a month; her husband Spider agrees to a divorce if she cleans up the Walsh home that night. When she arrives there she is met by her husband, his partner Meredith, Meredith's wife Savannah who wants to make contact with the operational entities living in the house and Adam, another polter who believes the house still belongs to him. When Spider refuses to give it back, he creates a binding spell that prevents anyone from leaving the abode; he hopes to mediate the ownership of house with Spider but before he can do that, someone kills him. Adam, a Marshall in the mundane plane and an investigator in the otherworld, with the help of Karma investigates the homicide. They have twelve hours to find the culprit otherwise the case will be taken out of their hands.

Katie MacAlister writing as Kate Marsh pens a spellbinding and enchanting paranormal mystery populated by a horde of polters, a unicorn, a guardian and the imps who keeps following Karma home no matter where she puts them are hilarious. Although there are a lot of magical scenes, it is mundane investigative techniques that give the heroine a GHOST OF A CHANCE in solving this paranormal locked room whodunit.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted January 31, 2008

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Summary

First in the USA Today bestselling author's new paranormal mystery series

There are other worlds with mysteries to solve.

Worlds where not all of the suspects are technically alive.

That's when Karma kicks in.

Karma Marx exorcises haunted houses, sending troublesome poltergeists and other spirits to the ever after. But one assignment traps Karma, her foster child, her sleazy soon-to-be-ex husband, Spider, and his crooked partner under one roof. And when Spider turns up dead, it's a locked house mystery, and Karma's determined to reveal the truth, even if it means tackling all of the mansion's inhabitants—mortal and otherwise...