After Dark

Para-archaeologist Lydia Smith has had nothing but bad days lately. After losing 48 hours and her memory in an alien tomb, she's lost her university job and is working at Shrimpton's House of Ancient Horrors while trying to start her consulting business.

Her first client is Emmett London who is looking for an ancient Earth artifact called the chest of curiosities. Lydia has her doubts about the provenance of the chest and also about Emmett but a job's a job. Only she doesn't make a good impression on Emmett when the two discover the body of one of Lydia's acquaintances near her office at the museum. Chester Brady had the same psychic talent as Lydia but didn't have the advantage of her education. He was quite a shady character.

Emmett is show more keeping a number of secrets about his quest and about himself which are slowly revealed through the story. He's really looking for his nephew who made off with the chest and then disappeared. The nephew isn't the only unexplained disappearance either.

Chester knew something about the disappearances and about a discovery of very rare artifacts and those who are trying to keep their crimes secret believe that he told Lydia. This puts Lydia in lots of danger and causes Emmett to move in with her to protect her.

Fuzz is the dust-bunny in this story. He's Lydia's companion and the one who rescued her when she was trapped in the alien ruins. He is very protective of Lydia even though he most often looks like dryer lint and is small enough to ride on her shoulder. He is a big fan of pretzels.

This is definitely science-fiction-lite but an entertaining paranormal romance. I liked the worldbuilding and the paranormal talents the residents of Harmony are developing. show less

Another futuristic romance set beyond the Curtain, this time on Harmony. The residents of harmony have different psychic gifts than those of St. Helens. They are able to use amber and psi energy to power everything from cars to televisions. Some are more gifted in that they can manipulate 'ghosts' and untangle 'traps' left in the old cities built by the former residents of the planet. These people are para-archaeologists and ghost hunters. Lydia and Emmett are just such a team, trying to find Emmett's nephew and a family heirloom he stole, they uncover something much more valuable, and dangerous.
I enjoyed this story. The world of ghost hunters and tanglers is intriguing. The mystery was complicated and well-written, even though it was a show more bit predictable. I never thought I'd be attracted to a hero named "Emmett" though! show less

I'm reading 2 books now that have female archaeologists in some future time dealing with discoveries of alien cultures. This is definitely a more enjoyable read. Although the usual formulaic attraction/repulsion with a male is involved, in general I feel Castle had fun writing this book and the hot-and-heavy is partly tongue in cheek.
This is as more a mystery/who-done-it than a typical scifi, as Lydia, former archaeologist disbarred from research who is starting a business as consultant for hire, tries to find who murdered Chester Brady, why his body was left where she would find it, who is trying to scare her off the case, and how this ties in to her first client's request.
Set in a time/place where people have developed psychic show more abilities which use amber to tap in to an alien power source which is still poorly understood. show less

What a mixed bag these books are. I came across free secondhand audiobook versions of them, so I figured why not. Although I had a vague association of the author with mediocre romance/PNR, I didn't worry too much about it. Free, after all.

I enjoyed some things. I didn’t mind the characters (except when I did); in some ways the story was pretty well told; I have to say the setting is fairly thorough and deep and well drawn… in places. It's an interesting idea, once exposition is provided. But it doesn't altogether make sense, and information is doled out in dribs and drabs and piecemeal, and a few explanations don't come until late in this first book or even the second. For example, it takes quite a while for the oddities in the show more story – a pet dust bunny with six legs? Ghosts which aren't really ghosts? – to become clearer: aha. The books aren't contemporary paranormal romance/urban fantasy, they're futuristic (I assume) science fictional urban fantasy/PNR, taking place on another planet which has influenced the genetics of humanity to the point that everyone's a little bit psychic.

The author relies heavily on cliché. If there's a well-worn overused phrase to insert into a given situation, she uses it. Otherwise the writing is tolerable, so once I'd adjusted to rolling my eyes every now and then as she blows the dust off yet another hairy old saying, it was quite readable (listen-to-able). Except for the fact that characters have an obnoxious habit of asking questions that were answered about a minute ago … This is another example of an author who either doesn't trust her own ability or doesn't trust her readers' reading comprehension skills, because it's yet another example of a book in which an occurrence is described, and then a short time later one of the participants talks about it in detail to someone who wasn't there – and then, on really special occasions, it all gets repeated a third time for some insufficient reason – no new information, no new take on the situation, just sheer grinding repetition. I don't understand how such things get past professional editors.

And on the subject of aggravating repetition, if I hear the phrase "lost weekend" one more time there may be consequences. I began to wish I had a digital copy of the book so I could do a count on how often the term is (over)used. And while I'm picking nits, Jayne Castle is also one of those writers who far too often has her characters doing something for "a long moment". It happens a lot, to a lot of writers, to the point that I noticed it when I was about eighteen years old and swore never, ever, ever to use "a long moment" in any form in anything I ever wrote. (Except book reviews.) It's even dustier and more annoying than the rest of the clichés in here.

Regarding the narration: Joyce Bean did a perfectly adequate job … she didn't become a favorite narrator, but she didn't irritate me. However, I don't really understand why Lydia's coworker Melanie has a Southern accent. If this is another planet, colonized by Earth humans long enough ago that their psi abilities have been affected by the environment and they can look back centuries to this huge war of theirs, then … how does someone have an accent from the U.S. 21st century South? Oh – wait. Maybe it's a very, very subtle reference to Doctor Who.

Speaking of that dust bunny, "Fuzz" (which I did a little while ago) … why do people like him? Because from what I've seen in other reviews and from the notes at the beginning of the second book, people do. It puzzles me; the thing has next to no personality. It's something that literally looks like a dust bunny, yet is a predator, yet is content to hang out as a pet; something which spends 90% of the book begging for or eating pretzels (another word I'd like to do a count for – those damn pretzels get more coverage than some characters in the book) and the other ten percent opening its second set of eyes or doing something else to underline the fact that it's not Terran. So … um … where is the entire rest of the animal kingdom of this planet? Does everything have four eyes and six legs? Do people have moronic names like "dust bunny" for everything? Is in fact "dust bunny" the official name for the things, or just a cutesy-ism? There is never to my knowledge a single reference to another native species except the extinct people who left behind the nifty tunnels and whatnot.

Really, I don't quite understand why the author felt the need to place the book, or rather the series, so entirely elsewhere, when so little was done to create this new world. The thing with the "ghosts" was explored a bit, eventually, but otherwise, with a search/replace for all those "rezzes" or whatever it is, it might as well have taken place in Milwaukee.

It's not the worst thing I've ever read or listened to. But, though I also listened to the second book, for the Everest-esque reason that "it was there", it doesn't inspire me to ever read anything else by Castle. show less

In the first book in the Harmony series, Lydia Smith used to be a prestigious para-archaeologist but lost her career after suffering a two-day black out in the catacombs that run under Cadence City. Now she works at a low-key museum and has started up her own consulting agency.
Emmett London is Lydia’s first client, but things don’t get off to a good start. When they discover a body together minutes after meeting, their lives become intertwined with the theft of a family heirloom, the kidnapping of Emmett’s nephew, a second murder, blackmail, and lots of secrets.
On the planet of Harmony, there seems to be two kinds of people: the ones who can control ghost energy (ghost hunters) and the other that can control trapping energy show more (tanglers). It’s pretty confusing to me.
Anyway, Lydia is a tangler, and she’s very prejudiced against ghost-hunters, especially those who work for the Cadence Guild. Lydia and a good portion of the city believe the Guild is a step up from mobsters since they act as though they’re above the law. In many cases, they are.
I couldn’t connect well with Lydia and Emmett. She acted way too snobbish and superior. As an ex-Guild boss from Resonance City, Emmett knows how to keep secrets, but he kept Lydia in the dark for far too long and fueled her dislike for people in his profession. I couldn’t feel any romance or chemistry between them. All they seemed to do was argue, make out to avoid discussing their problems, and then argue some more because she didn’t trust his intentions toward her.
The book could use a light edit to fix a few misspelled words, etc. I sometimes had a hard time figuring out what was going on.
The story ends with a few unanswered questions. There’s not a cliffhanger, per se, but Emmett and Lydia’s relationship isn’t wrapped up. There’s a second book that features this couple, so hopefully their relationship will grow with more romance and trust between them.
Overall, I liked the story for the murder-mystery plot, but I wish I could’ve related to the H/h.
3 Stars

Disclaimer – I bought this book for my own enjoyment. I am not paid or compensated in any way, shape, or form for this honest review. I will not change or alter this review for any reason unless at my discretion. show less

As Cosmo said "good fun", not the worlds best novel a romance novel thinly disguised as Science Fiction, about a transparent as a window with plot, but readable. It’s the kind of book I read to remind me how good some other authors are. I have a soft spot for Ms Krentz as her stuff is readable pap but good when I’m not in the mood for anything vaguely challenging!

And I re-read this in 2020 and it was as much fun the second time around. Lydia Smith had an incident in an alien tomb and now she's considered damaged goods so she works at Shrimpton's House of Ancient Horrors, a low-budget museum, while occasionally taking on side jobs. Then she finds a body in an exhiit and finds out that her new client is one of the most powerful men in show more this world. Investigating the death brings them into complicated plot and attraction.

Second time through I found it just as enjoyable as the first. show less

DNF at 14%. I should have abandoned it sooner. It teeters on the edge of okay, and I love the pet, but there are several strikes against it that are endemic, unavoidable, and annoying. The language is very current-Earth-US English, give that this is supposedly cut off from Earth for some chunk of time.

I can almost forgive that. But no attempt at all do think through colloquialisms even to the point where a character's described as wearing 'chinos' and 'leather'? Um...

I am intrigued with the extinct aliens stuff. And the dust bunny. But this reads like a murder mystery with magic on top stuffed into a science fiction shell. The MC feels rather ordinary, even with the mystery trauma. Who cares about boring landlord trouble. And the show more other MC has gotten too little page time for me to care about him.

This review would be shorter, but I'm frustrated with this. It had promise, and several in the series are at my library, and I... just can't. show less