The Bloodhound Files: Dying Bites by D. D. Barant

Jace Valcheck is a profiler for the FBI until a strange dream one night catapults her into a strange alternate world where people like her, Full Blooded Humans, are in the minority. Because the world has been taken over by Vampires and werewolves, as well as Golems.

Jace is already a rather peppery-tempered person, but discovering that humans are in the minority throws her and makes her even more nasty and sarcastic to the man who is going to be her boss, a vampire named David Cassius. It turns out that they need her because of her human knowledge of insanity. Because there are so few humans, this world never got the kind of knowledge that our world has of diseased and troubled minds. And because of advances in artificial blood, there is very little murder.

But now someone has gone out of their way to kill both a vampire and a Lyke in extremely disturbing ways. Lost on their own, the supernaturals of this world need Jace's help to catch whoever is doing it. But Jace isn't exactly a strong fit with this world- not only is she one of a very few humans, but she has to drink a special powdered mix or she could die because of the disconnect between our own dimension and the one she inhabits now.

But even as she interacts with her co-workers, Eisfanger the vampire CSI and Charlie Aleph, the golem, she has an innate attraction to the man who is also her boss- but she's also attracted to the hunky Lyke doctor Peter Adams, who helped her while she was in the hospital.

The first crime scene was the death of a Lykae, torn apart on the silver daggers of an iron maiden he was forced into before the moon rose. The second was a female vampire who bled out in the medical room of a former concentration camp. A camp, Jace learns, that only held humans- for when the Japanese Emperor decided to rid Japan of humans, the humans weren't given a chance- convert or be killed. Forcibly infected with either Lycanthropy or turned into vampires, they had no choice.

This information horrifies Jace, and she confronts her boss, only to find out that her suspicion is true: Humans aren't rare because they died or killed each other off, but because the Supernaturals: Vampires and Lykae- were the ones who thinned their numbers so badly. This makes Jace disinclined to help the people who brought her here, but nearly dying because she'd stopped taking her medicine brings her back to her original job. She's signed a contract. She can't leave until the killer is caught.

Worse, she finds that the person doing the killings is really a Human, and that the kill sites all have to do with exterminations or forcible conversions of humans. And the killer, a man named Aristotle Stoker, has a grudge against the other Supernaturals because of how they have nearly wiped out the humans, and Jace is starting to feel conflicted, because she's not all that happy with it herself. But as her team travels to Alaska following Jace's hunch about Stoker's whereabouts, Stoker is already making plans to reach her- and to persuade her to join his side.

But can Jace seriously consider coming down on the side of someone who is a serial killer, if not a serial killer of humans? Will Stoker be able to persuade her that her cause is just and righteous? Or will her attraction to the Supernaturals, along with her inherent humanity keep her on the path to bringing him down? Who will Jace choose, and who will she choose to destroy?

Jace is another kick-ass action gal- when did that come to mean snarly and suspicious and sarcastic? It's as if these women were anything but, it would call their kick-ass cred into question. I'm starting to get sick of feeling like my action hero heroines all came from a "one size fits all" mold. Especially in this case, where Jace supposedly works for the FBI- because I have a feeling that even as a Profiler, she'd not be getting away with that crap on her job, no matter how good she was. Hasn't she even heard of professionalism?

Okay, yeah, she's in a new reality, and maybe that could just be bringing out the true personality buried behind the professionalism. But I doubt it. She never thinks that okay, I have to put on my professional face now. It's just all bitchy all the time from her. This issue kept kicking me right out of the story every time she descended into it.

The rest of the story I really enjoyed, The world-building, the enjoyable characters, and the magic- all made me give a little leap of joy inside. It was interesting and engrossing, both the world and people in it. We don't get to see much of straight humans, since they apparently all live in protected places, so we don't get to see how many of them feel about their situation. The ones we do see are damn mad about it and want to kill the monsters responsible- but how representative are they of all humans?

Even with the heroine's unprofessional attitude knocking me out of the story every few pages, I still ended up enjoying the story. I just wish that Jace wasn't always acting so unprofessionally. It would have made me like her, and the story, much better. Recommended.