IN TOO DEEP

Premiere of Krentz’s new trilogy about a psychic detective agency.

In this latest addition to the Arcane Society series, para-detective Fallon Jones has finally met his match in Isabella Valdez, who has washed up in his home base, a remote, cliffside Northern California village called Scargill Cove. A few decades back, a commune of hippies lived here, under the sway of a guru who disappeared under mysterious circumstances but whose skeletal remains were later found in a bomb shelter hidden behind the Cove’s no-tell motel. Scargill, a “nexus” of psychic energy, is a magnet for the preternaturally endowed. Strong, silent Fallon, whose psychic “talent” empowers him to see order in chaos, is instantly drawn to Isabella. Isabella invites herself to join Fallon’s agency, Jones & Jones, as an investigator. Fallon is descended from those paranormal aristocrats the Joneses, Victorian-era pillars of the Arcane Society. For centuries, the Society, a shadowy league of talents working for good, has battled the minions of occult evil. The first case Isabella takes on, a routine ghost check of a mansion listed for sale, uncovers much more than she bargained for: a serial killer, a basement hiding human remains and, more importantly for Jones & Jones, a clock invented by Victorian genius, and Jones’ nemesis, Mrs. Bridewell. That’s just the beginning of this impossibly convoluted saga. Fallon and Isabella succumb all too soon to blistering passion, but probably not often enough for romance readers’ expectations. The plot connecting the sex scenes, which involves internecine warfare among good psychics, bad psychics and clandestine government agencies, not to mention factions within the Society itself, soon becomes too “arcane” to sustain interest.

A chaotic welter of loose ends that Fallon himself couldn’t unsnarl.