Not great, not bad. Concept was interesting - Kate acquired the ability to see an aura that determined if someone's life was in danger through illness or accident. The setting is primarily in London.

There's murder, a bit of tame romance, and dealing with guilt over past events.

The writing didn't flow quite as well as most contemporary fiction, but the story line was good. One thing I will mention - I didn't catch ANY misspelled or improper usage of words and the punctuation was correct. I get so tired of reading books where the author was too lazy to have the book proofread, and this was refreshing. ( )

DESCRIPTION, NOT REVIEW: The FIRST book in the Kate Benedict paranormal mystery series.
SHE KNOWS WHO'S GOING TO DIE! BUT NO ONE WILL BELIEVE HER...
Life spins out of control for London architect Kate Benedict when she sees a dancing aura above certain people’s heads that seems to signal death. Suddenly she’s psychic. But that can't be! Psychic’s not acceptable in her circle, where the supernatural is strictly for the superstitious. And yet…people are dying. People close to her.

Kate's tentative attempts to talk about her new-found metaphysical gift are met with eye rolls, so much so that she can’t even tell the nice Scotland Yard detective who's investigating the death of a close friend, Rebecca Williams. And now Rebecca’s neighbor has an aura.

So what's Kate to do but try to save him by turning detective herself? A break-in and attack on her boyfriend confirm that the murderer’s catching on that Kate knows too much. But he (or maybe she) has no idea that what Kate knows is a little on the paranormal side. ( )

After an incident where her mother appears to her after passing over 6 months prior, Kate’s head takes a hard knock and she’s now seeing the auras on some folk and it appears the clearer she can see it, the higher the risk of them dying in the very near future. When a friend dies Kate feels guilt that she hadn’t been able to stop the death and is convinced that she’d been murdered. So this story is two-fold; the first is understanding what she’s seeing and what she can do about, and the other is the mystery into her friend’s death.

What Kate goes through is difficult between the constant guilt and fear she carries as well as the weird fact that the concept of the metaphysical or paranormal seems so odd to most other characters in the story. Kudos to the author for making the reader feel Kate’s emotions, but dang, a good chunk of the story felt depressing.

I thought the mystery aspect of it was nicely twisted as is how Kate got the clues; I certainly didn’t see the who and why until it was revealed. ( )