No Humans Involved
Kelley Armstrong
Bantam, May 2007, $20.00, 352 pp.
ISBN: 0553805088

A home in Brentwood, California is being used to house the stars and staff of the TV reality special "Death of Innocence" where three mediums demonstrate their powers. Only one of them, by the name of Jaime Vegas, is the real thing, a talented necromancer who can see and talk to the dead. The climax of the special is to contact Marilyn Monroe but Jaime's interest in the show is that she touched by ghosts and hears their chatter but can't make out what they are saying which has never happened to her before.

She can't reach out to them but through empirical evidence she comes to the conclusion that they are children who were killed using blood magic. They are stuck in between places and neither another medium nor Jaime's ghostly friends can reach them. The demon Aratron tells Jaime that the magic being used to keep the children in limbo is something unheard of: human magic. Now Jaime and her allies and her werewolf lover Jeremy, the north American alpha werewolf, try to set a trap that would bring the human magic practitioners out of hiding so that Jaime can find a way to let the children pass over.

Jaime has some interesting allies on both sides of the veil including a half demon with chaos powers. a spirit in life that was a practitioner of the dark arts and now works for the Three Fates, and a werewolf. All of these characters are well developed, play significant parts in the story and are powerful beings not to be trifled with. Kelly Armstrong writes spellbinding, supernatural fantasy in the tradition of Laurell K. Hamilton, Kim Harrison and Charlaine Harris. There is plenty of action and a heated romance in NO HUMANS INVOLVED.

Harriet Klausner