Any Given Doomsday by Lori Handeland

Elizabeth Phoenix is an ex-cop turned private detective, using her psychic skills to see into the past to help the cops and her clients fight against crime and injustice. This is something that she does mainly because of her background as an orphan, abandoned into the care of a woman called Ruthie. Ruthie raised kids who had fallen through the cracks in the system, and made sure that those children found love and a real home under her care.

But when Liz finds that her former foster mother has been murdered, and quite viciously as well, she breaks off to find the person or people who killed her mentor. To do so, she teams up with her ex-lover Jimmy Sanducci, another one of Ruthie's foster kids, and like a brother to Liz when they were growing up. When they became adults, they fell in love and became lovers. When Liz caught him with another woman, it devastated her. But Jimmy is party to Ruthie's secrets that Liz knew nothing about.

And now with Ruthie dead, Ruthie has passed on her own powers of prophecy to Liz, making her not only a seer, but the head seer of an organization that fights against the darkness of the coming Armageddon, but against the monsters that will bring it about. As Liz struggles to control her now greatly-expanded ability to see, she begins to realize that both Jimmy and another man who Ruthie once sent her to in order to learn from, are both something more than human. Jimmy is a Dhampir, a half-human, half-vampire hybrid, and her former teacher Sawyer is a Skinwalker, someone able to change their shape into any animal by touching the correct tattoo on his body. But while he initiates Liz into her powers by becoming her lover, Jimmy is on a mission to find the Strega, or Vampire Witch, responsible for Ruthie's death.

Unfortunately for the both of them, the Strega turns out to be much more powerful than either of them anticipated, and he also turns out to be Jimmy's actual father. His power is such that Jimmy is caught in his father's growing web and turned to his evil. When Liz goes to rescue him, she is caught in a trap and thrown to Jimmy who has crossed the line into vampire-like behavior. Becoming Jimmy's prisoner as well as that of his Strega father's, Liz must fight for the strength to hang on. But with her mentor Ruthie giving her no advice but to love Jimmy to save him, can she find the power to love him as he is slowly killing her with sex and blood drinking? Can she lead Jimmy's soul back to her by getting him to remember their love, or is she doomed to failure and death in the beginning of the apocalypse?

I started reading this series and was sucked in immediately by Elizabeth Phoenix's strong character voice. Although she starts out the series never wanting to see her former lover Jimmy Sanducci again, during the course of the series, she realizes that even with all their problems, she never really stopped loving him. And with the revelation of who and what really caused Ruthie's death, she is thrown headlong from a life that made some sort of sense into a life where she is confronted by things that no sane person really believes exists, but which she has to believe in because they are being exposed right in front of her face.

One of her powers, apparently innate and brought out by Ruthie passing on her seer powers to Liz, is the ability to absorb new powers through sex with the person possessing them. By becoming lovers with Sawyer, she not only gains greater control over her powers as a seer, but also gains his ability to transform into an animal. Indeed, it is an unintended side-effect of this power that finally enables Liz to triumph over the Strega. But by becoming his lover again when he is controlled by the darkness within him, Liz also absorbs some of that darkness, which has ramifications we can't currently see.

Even as she saves Jimmy, his actions in this novel also drive them apart, setting up the next novel in the series quite neatly, which will be called "Doomsday Can Wait". I enjoyed this novel enough to keep reading, and I want to see what's coming next, though I don't mind waiting in this case.