Dark Nights, Dark Dreams by Savannah Russe

Susan Ann Marie Chase, known as Sam for short, is a U.S. Foreign Agent stationed in Baghdad. Sam has a secret. She's actually a psychic, warned by a woman's voice in her head when there is trouble coming. In fact, she feels a warning about the embassy in her head and knows she must get out. A suicide bomber is about to bomb the building. She runs, trying to warn everyone she can but isn't able to save everyone.

However, this bomb warning brings her to the attention of the higher-ups, and she is summarily put on a plane to Washington. Sam is upset, because she wanted to be posted to Paris. She's been dreaming of Parisian men: sexy, literate, intelligent. But it is not to be... she's been reassigned to Washington to help the CIA. Ms. Z, the handler that meets her, tells her it is to use her psychic powers on behalf of the country. When Sam insists she doesn't have powers, the woman tells her that the only other explanation is that she was in on the bombings. When Sam says that's bogus, the other woman agrees, and gets Sam to admit she has psychic powers- by showing her the file that has been kept on her showing other unexplainable incidents in her career and all the way back to when she was just a child.

When Sam asks why the agency needs her powers, Ms. Z tells her that a crime has occurred that is so horrific, it couldn't be done by any human agency, so the CIA is turning to psychics and other people with power to solve the crime before more such acts are committed. The situation is so important that Sam can't even wait to get settled in: she must go to the scene now.

On the ground, she is introduced to some of the people she'll be working with, a scary woman named Rina Martus who claims to have Dark Powers from Voodoo, and Lance "Bear" Rutledge, a forensics man from the DOD. Rina scares Sam, but she feels like she's touching a live electrical wire when she shakes Bear's hand. This disquiets and disturbs her, because she thinks Bear is the complete opposite of what she's always wanted in a man.

The crime they are investigating is the desecration of a grave in Arlington Cemetary. Someone, it seems, sneaked in and made off with a body of a soldier who recieved a Congressional Medal of Honor, and left behind a heart and brains. But according to the Park Services Man who discovered the open grave, the heart was still beating and the brains somehow moving like snakes. He was so spooked by it that he doesn't want to stay there any longer.

Rina is so distracted by the cries of the dead from their graves that she couldn't even stay around to interview the man from the Parks Service, and even Sam heard someone calling her to "come to me, come to me". But she stayed, and she and Bear establish that someone was filming in the Cemetary, and that the film crew, whoever they were, didn't have permission to do so. Bear decides to track down footage of the film crew, and then goes to check out the company while Sam, utterly exhausted and Jetlagged, is taken to her home by Ms. Z, and she is introduced to another of her soon to be co-workers, Francis Corey, a witch from Salem Massachusetts. Frankie was in a coven, but was thrown out. Another co-worker, Aurora Daybreak, hasn't yet arrived. Ms. Z tells them that they will be rooming with Sam, who is going to be the nominal boss of the operation, which they call AngelWay.

Sam doesn't like it, but realizes she has no choice. She takes the others to her family home, a splitlevel house from the 70's, and they settle in together, where they are soon joined by Aurora Daybreak, a Cherokee who is an animal psychic. Each sounds out the other, and soon they are at least friendly with each other. They cook, eat, and go shopping for food for each other, and settle in for the night.

Regarding the case, each woman does a divination, Rina with bones, Sam is guided into using Frankie's crystal ball, and they do a ritual to open up Sam's psychic power. But Aurora is sure there is some kind of curse on the house. She smudges with a sweetgrass bundle, but warns that the problem isn't taken care of. It's only a temporary measure.

The investigation soon turns dark when they realize that what they are facing is nothing less than zombies. Zombies raised by Petro Voodoo, and possibly involving the Bokor named Black Rat. He also seems to be involved with the curse on Sam's house, but Rina is a Houngan of the Blue-eyed Snake, a natural enemy to rats. Meanwhile, Sam and Bear can't fight their attraction to each other. But will their relationship be over when he discovers she has psychic powers?

Frankie is also having somewhat romantic encounters with Liam Mahoney, a part-Irish working as a cook for the cousin of the Prince of Oman, who is visiting the US along with his family. But she feels he is lying to her about something, even as she investigates the sighting of a robbery of the house by what looked like a gray infant. She determines that it is a Malaysian child spirit known as a Toyol, probably obtained by the Malaysian gardener who'd been upset with the Prince's cousin. She learns from the gardener that the Prince's cousin was burying hearts in the garden, and brains, too, linking him to the voodoo problem.

But the people behind the turning of US soldiers into voodoo zombies are doing it for a reason other than pure evil, and it will be up to Bear, Sam, Rina and the other operatives of AngelWay to defeat them before they can fulfill their plans for the soldiers and the rulership of Oman. But faced with the forces arrayed against them, some of which are in the highest echelons of government, is there any way for them to defeat this plot? And is there any future for Bear and Sam, even if they should win and survive?

I enjoyed Savannah Russe's Darkwing books, but the heroine of that series is a little too hung up on clothes and fashion to really serve as a surrogate for me. Sam is much more my style. She's relatively down to earth, and aside from her psychic powers, she's a strong woman who is uncharacteristically weakened by being co-opted by government agencies who know her secrets.

I liked the way she doesn't go to pieces just because she may be falling in love with Bear, a man who she feels is totally unsuitable for her (at first, anyway). He may save her, but she ends up saving him at several points during the novel, so it all evens out in the end. In the end, she has to face his scorn for those who have psychic powers (or as he would probably phrase it, those who think they do) that makes her sad because she knows hers are real.

I can already smell sequel-bait with Frankie and Liam, and even though there story isn't advertised in the back of this book, I am sure that they will be the next ones written about in this series. But I'm okay with that.

I liked this book. I liked how each of the heroines embodies a different kind/variety of spirituality and power, from Sam the western-style psychic, Rina the Southern Voodoo Queen, Frankie the Northern Wiccan, and Aurora, the Native American pet psychic. How well she does all their spiritualities and powers I can't say as well as a real practicioner of such, but it seemed relatively authentic to me.

For those readers turned off by the "Darkwing" heroine's obsessions with clothes and human men, this series provides a welcome antidote that falls squarely into the "paranormal" category, but is more palatable to other tastes. It's sexy and thrilling all the same time. Recommended.