Two powerful aura talents find love while working a J&J case together at the tropical paradise of Maui
The action-adventure portion of this romantic-suspense novel offers massively, paranormally powerful villains from the Nightshade cabal, which is a continuing, significant source of evildoers throughout the Arcane Society (AS) series. The setup for this particular novel is as follows: Fallon Jones, who heads the Jones and Jones (J&J) detective agency, whose primary customer is the governing council of the AS, has tracked down a paranormal murderer, who is going to be on Maui within a couple of days. He assigns two of his stable of part-time, independent-contractor agents to identify him via, not just his outward physical appearance, but by his aura. Those agents are Grace Renquist, who lives in Eclipse Bay, Oregon, and Luther Malone, who lives on Maui. Both Grace and Luther are aura talents, but with a different twist as to how each of their unique talents work.
Both Grace and Luther are "off the chart," 10+ "psi" talents. Within the AS community, those who exhibit that degree of talent are labeled by the pejorative designation, "exotics," due to rampant distrust and fear of the intensity and rarity of their psi gifts. This deviant status makes it nearly impossible to find a life mate among fellow psi talents, via official AS matchmakers, who routinely declare exotics to be unmatchable. (This is a recurring theme throughout this series and the Harmony series.)
Luther has tried and failed to find a mate among ordinary humans. Within the past four years, he has been divorced twice. His marriages took less than a year to crash and burn, because he kept his paranormal side secret, since he knew neither of is ordinary-human wives would understand. Grace has avoided the rejection that Luther has suffered, because she has not yet bothered to try and find someone she might successfully marry.
No age is given, overtly, for either Grace or Luther. However, by indirectly adding up what math is provided regarding the length of years of various jobs they have held, they seem to be within the typical age range that JAK assigns to all of her romantic protagonists, which is 28-32 for the FMC and 36-40 for the MMC. Grace appears to be around 31, and Luther is "going on 40," so approximately 38 or 39 years old.
Grace lives in Eclipse Bay, Oregon, a fictional, quirky beach town, which is the setting of the Eclipse Bay trilogy (2000-2002). That series has no paranormal elements. Arizona Snow is a significant subcharacter throughout the EB series, and in this novel, she is Grace's landlady. Grace recognizes from Arizona's aura, but does not say anything about it to Arizona, that Arizona is a "strategy" ("strat") talent. This is the first instance of JAK's drawing Arizona into the AS universe as a paranormal talent. She is a significant subcharacter as well in a subsequent AS novel, In Too Deep (2010), in which Fallon Jones is the MMC. It is made clear in that book that Arizona knows Fallon Jones.
By the way, I find it interesting to note that, with all of the many magical talents JAK has offered in the AS world, not one character has ever been created by her who has the paranormal ability of healing the physical body. There have been multiple FMCs with the ability to heal--or destroy --"parasenses," and the ability is usually demonstrated when she destroys an enemy, as Grace does in this novel, or heals the MMC, when he has burned out his parasenses by overusing his paranormal talent. Perhaps JAK has chosen to not offer that type of magical ability to differentiate what she writes, paranormal romance (PR), from both traditional fantasy and urban fantasy, in which there are always magical healers. In PR, there are limited magical elements and relatively little worldbuilding is necessary.
This is one of my favorite books of the entire AS series, because it offers one of my favorite romance tropes: Two alienated outsiders find in each other their soulmate, and one or both of them forms, or has previously formed, a family of affiliation AKA found family, consisting of fellow alienated outsiders. As is always the case with the protagonists in every JAK PR novel, both Grace and Luther are honorable and courageous, frequently protecting and defending people who are being victimized by horrible villains.
I have read this novel multiple times since it was released in 2008. I own the Kindle version, and I recently obtained access to the audiobook version through Hoopla. The female narrator, Islay Jacobs, does a good job.