Welcome back to Harmony, or rather Illusion Town, as Castle's scifi paranormal future romance series continues -- this time with a lot of crossover for fans of her historical paranormal series the Arcane Society (under pseudo Amanda Quick).

Yeah that was a lot of words I threw at you, but its all sort of necessary to understand how this works.

This being how interconnected all of Castle' (or Jayne Anne Krentz/Amanda Quick)'s series have become despite being across at least three different time periods/romance categories.

The Harmony books are by far my favorite series of hers. They're snappy paranormal scifi romances that trend towards clever, reaourceful and POWERFUL women with a denseness in the romance department that would normally make me groan, but instead makes sense. Meanwhile the men are all rogues with bad senses of humor, hearts of gold and sharp intellect that largely want to support the women without controlling them. The world of Harmony is, honestly, pretty cut and dry. While solutions can be a bit gray-scaled, the people are either good or bad. The good save folk, the bad leave folk to die horrible deaths lost in the underground labyrinth of alien psy-ghosts.

This is no different; though our male lead (Gabriel) is kind of an idiot (which he does realize pretty quickly) in regards to first impressions with our heroine Lucy (who tells him so happily and often).

It may have been a while for me, but this seemed abnormally interested in setting up the mystery to solve than with the romance. The heat is there, the awareness of each other, but they spend more time chasing down antique thieves and dodging assassins then making out.

Still this was a wonderful return to a world I sorely miss and makes me hopeful there will be more in the future (my humor is as bad as a Guild Boss' okay?). ( )

As always once started I could not put the book down. Otis is another dust bunny who will make you smile. This is Gabriel Jones & Lucy Bell's story. Adventure, mystery, suspense, fun, and, of course, romance. It has it all. Do love these stories. ( )

So nice to be back in the Harmony world! While I still prefer the original Gabriel Jones (in Second Sight), I did enjoy this one and I loved Lucy. Great story, nice balance of the romantic and suspense elements and I appreciated that the peril moments weren't long. Just a great story all around. ( )

Gabriel Jones rescues Lucy Bell after she was kidnapped, drugged, stripped of her amber, and left underground. Then he goes off to his next job leaving Lucy to deal with the fallout: rumors fly saying she was drunk and took drugs. She's lost her reputation and her career and is now driving a tour bus to make ends meet.

When Gabriel returns, Lucy is angry with him, but he needs her skills with managing psychic storms in the underground and also wants a chance to get to know her better. An arcane object brought from Earth has been stolen and he has the skills to track it down - with Lucy's help.

Meanwhile, other plots are unfolding and Lucy is needed for all of them. When a second kidnapping attempt is made and attempts are made on Gabriel's life since he's the new, and first, Guild Boss in Illusion Town, the two begin investigating to protect themselves and restore Lucy's reputation.

The dust bunny in this one is Otis. He finds Lucy when she is lost underground and brings her pizza to live on. Later he leads Gabriel to her.

I liked the relationship between Lucy and Gabriel. The plot was twisty enough to keep me reading late into the night. There were also a number of Easter Eggs that brought reminders of earlier books in the Arcane series for readers who have read them.

All in all, this was a fun addition to both the Arcane series and the Harmony series. ( )

For some reason, I really liked this story. I usually complain about the sameness of her books but this one didn't bother me as much. I like her books because they are fast to read, the dialog is good, and in the Harmony books, the world building is good. However, she still has the awful tendency to have her villain(s) explain the plot at the end of the book. I they didn't stop to do that, they might have lived longer. ( )