After Dark by Jayne Castle

This book's spine labeled it as romance. It was, but it had a very strong Fantasy bent as well. I would probably have labeled it fantasy over romance.

I enjoyed this book once I got through the acronyms! The book is set on another world with a whole different set of physics rules. Instead of engines or gas, vehicles move by using psychic power. Most people on the planet have some small amount of psychic talent. People with more psychic talents become either ghost hunters or tanglers. Ghost hunters summon or dissipate the energy of ghosts. Tanglers either set or untangle traps found in the cities left by the people who inhabited the planet before the current inhabitants came through the curtain.

Lydia Smith used to be a para-archaeologist who explored the cities of the past. After a weekend caught in a psi-trap, she loses her job because no one has ever come out of a trap before. She now works at Shrimpton's Museum, which is along the lines of a wax museum. She is trying to start her own consulting business on the side.

She is meeting a new client, Emmett London, when the two of them stumble upon the body of Lydia's shady friend, Chester. Emmett has come to Lydia to get help with finding a curio cabinet that came through the Curtain with his family. Lydia comes to find that Emmett is not telling the entire truth, and the two of them are pulled into a tangle of disappearing teenagers, untrained ghost hunters, and dreamstone that has been worked when it usually crumbled during mining.

My favorite part of the book was Lydia's pet dust bunny. I want to have a dust bunny as a pet! They have six legs/feet and two sets of eyes. They're predators, but they love pretzels.

I would recommend this book to people who like romance, suspense, mystery and fantasy. If you don't like fantasy, move along and find another book.