(I read this as included in the Secret Worlds anthology.)
Influential media superstar Mercer Chaplin (and noted sexy womanizer) arrives at Cassi’s school to recruit people to join his new on campus software project. Both her and her roommate have signed up to be on the project. Her roommate Serenity is a genius coder, and Cassi is a journalism major and will cover the project for the school paper. Mercer takes a special interest in Cassi and flirts with her relentlessly, to the annoyance of Serenity, who says he’s family who burned her in the past. And then Cassi’s aunt swings into town reminding her of her heritage and duty. She is a Pandoran, one of the descendants of Pandora who opened the box and let all of the evil into the world. As a Pandoran, Cassi is tasked with finding those evil spirits, capturing them, and taking them home with her to be locked away so they won’t be able to continue to plague humanity. As well as evil spirits, she is also tasked with dispatching any gods too, since they are just as evil and harmful as the spirits. And when students attached to the project start committing suicide on campus, Cassi can sense there is an evil spirit hunting them.
Honestly, from the description this sounded like yet another Buffy the Vampire Slayer wannabe. Yet another female paranormal enforcement hunter who solves everything with whatever weapons are on hand. And it was. But it also involves the Greek Gods (not just the Pandora legend), and that is a definite sale point for me. I’m not going to name names, for spoiler sake (but it did involve one of my favorite gods). Personally, this did hew more toward urban than fantasy, so we got a lot of basic relationship drama between the characters, but I never really saw Cassi in any classes, nor did I ever really understand what the software project was about. I usually prefer my books to be more fantasy than urban. There was a lot of action in this, as you would expect in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer type book, fighting against evil forces. And there was a lot of mystery since some of the characters love to keep secrets and the audience has to work out what side people are on, who really was causing the deaths, and what the relationships are, as well as having to change some pre-conceived notions. I loved the chemistry between Cassi and Mercer, the entire way through, though I got irritated at her for continually running, instead of standing her ground and facing things and trying understand. I also got irritated at her for going into dangerous situations without any backup. I know it’s spoilery, but the couple of sex scenes felt rushed. And I loved her friendship with Serenity, though at the beginning I had started to wonder if Serenity was a figment of her imagination since she didn’t seem to really interact with other characters and seemed to only talk to Cassi. I would love to see more books written and turn this into a series with more adventures with Cassi and Mercer (and Serenity). I did love the ending on this story, but there is plenty of room for a return and plenty of potential kinks to face.
(The version I read that was included in the Secret Worlds anthology had plenty of typos that needed to be fixed. We’re talking several per page. I figure it may have been a preliminary copy given to the anthology, so the actual book published was hopefully cleaner).