Heart of Malice

Debut author Edmonds gives readers an energetic romp in her predictable but fun urban fantasy. A magically gifted woman on the run from her grandfather’s organized crime ring reinvents herself as Alice Worth, a private investigator who deals with supernatural cases. When she takes on a client who’s defending a magical bequest from magic-hating relatives, Alice must do everything in her power to save her before a secret weapon is unleashed that could destroy everything. Edmonds’s prose is energetic, but she does nothing new with her genre. Alice is both spunky and self-deprecating, with incredibly advanced magical powers. Her romance with Sean the werewolf is hackneyed, from the cute nicknames to the drawn-out sex scenes. There is promise in Edmonds’s melding of the supernatural and the everyday, but the novel does not escape predictability. (July)