Dead Spots (Scarlett Bernard Book 1)

Melissa F. Olson

Kindle Edition

$1.99

Scarlett Bernard knows about personal space: step within ten feet of her, and anything supernatural is instantly neutralized—vampires and werewolves become human again, and witches can’t cast the slightest spell. Scarlett uses her status as a null to cover up crime scenes for Los Angeles’s three most powerful magical communities, helping them keep humanity, and the LAPD, in the dark.
One night Scarlett gets caught at the scene of a grisly murder by the all-too-human LAPD cop Jesse Cruz, who blackmails her into a deal: he’ll keep quiet about the supernatural underworld if she helps him crack the case. Their pact doesn’t sit well with Dashiell, the city’s chief vampire, who fears his whole empire is at stake. And when the clues start to point to Scarlett herself, it’ll take more than her unique powers to catch the real killer and clear her name.

This was a great  take on what is an over-whelmed genre. Although this book does deal with the typical monsters, i.e. vampires, werewolves and witches, the main emphasis on this story is the fact that our protagonist is a Null -someone who nullifies the magic in a specific radius around them.

Scarlett has been hired by the otherworldly community to be a cleanup person. She cleans up the messes that cannot be explained to the human community. She helps keep the `monsters' hidden.

*Light Spoiler* Scarlett also believes that she is the only one with this ability in this part of the country, but she comes to find out that she is wrong.  It will be interesting to see if and how this fact plays out in future books.

It took me quite a while to warm up to the characters in this novel and even after finishing it I am still not so sure I actually `liked' everyone I should be liking. I have no problems with the secondary characters. The author has done a wonderful job in letting me `see' them emotionally as how the author expects. It's this trio of Scarlett, Jesse (a human cop) and Eli the werewolf who is to be Scarlett's helper until another Null can be found, that I am having problems with.
These three characters come off, in my opinion as ineffective, not quite inept but darn close to it.

There are several interesting twists to this story. There is  maybe, a love/like triangle happening and something evil happening with a once beloved and trusted character that will set us up for the next book.

This was not a waste of time to read and I will be starting the next book in about 15 minutes so I can tell you I liked it enough to try the next one. However, I hope with the second book, I see some growth with the 3 main characters and that they become less passive.