THE DIAMOND ROSE

A young woman suddenly gains potent psychic abilities and grapples with an inappropriate romantic attraction in this debut novel.

Enjoying a rare vacation at a ritzy Panamanian resort, Amanda Griffith is set on relaxing with her best friend, Lydia Shelby. They’re ready to celebrate after finishing medical school and will soon be busy residents, Amanda in anesthesiology and Lydia in psychiatry. Or that’s the plan until a solar flare changes their lives drastically. They’re attacked by a smoky black column of pure evil that renders Lydia unconscious. Acting instinctively, Amanda zaps the entity with a surprising blast of energy from her fingertips. The mystified Amanda learns from Matt Chadwick, a young man at the resort who had tried to help, that solar flares can cause some people, called Sentinels, to quickly develop formidable psychic talents that last 10 years. The Committee, an old and secret organization, directs Sentinels in battling evil, for which they’ll be well paid. Both women turn out to be Sentinels, but Amanda is the most powerful type, a Sentinel 10. As such, she’s given especially cushy compensation, yet the work comes easily for her once she begins. More difficult to handle is Amanda’s explosive confrontation with her inner darkness and a potentially ruinous romance. Valenti, in her engrossing novel, at first seems to be offering a familiar plotline about discovering supernatural abilities to fulfill a special destiny. But Amanda isn’t a young adolescent, and the story’s true focus is her love triangle with a ruggedly handsome but emotionally unavailable pilot and a psychopath who can feel normal emotions only when he’s with her. The author nicely ties the plots together and skillfully establishes the psychological groundwork for her characters that makes Amanda’s dilemma believably wrenching, helping to counterbalance her considerable powers, beauty, and wealth.

A well-judged and absorbing mix of genres with strong characterizations.