Smoke and Shadows

Smoke and Shadows is the latest "Vicki Nelson" novel. I suspect Tanya is returning to that universe for financial reasons, because the book itself feels like a "paint-by-numbers" effort that could have been spawned from a random plot generator. Vicki herself makes no appearance, and Henry plays a role that could be described as "muscle" -- if you were feeling like flattery, which any fan of this series won't be.

If that's not enough of a dire warning to drive you away from the book, read on. Because it's not really that bad. It's just stuck on the lower end of the Vicki Nelson series, and that particular series started at mediocre and went downhill about the time the corpse of Vicki's mother was turned into an undead robot by a deranged mortician. This book isn't THAT bad. In fact, after that disaster, it's almost a return to form. But it's definitely not as interesting as the first three.