Many Travails of John Smith

The stakes are real. The mediator isn't. "Investigation, Mediation, Vindication." That's how the Yellow Pages ad starts, and if it sounds like the sort of thing a drunk teenager might come up with . . . well, you'd only be wrong about the teenager part. John Smith owns San Diego's smallest private investigation firm, but he doesn't know the first thing about mediation. Or vindication. On the other side of town, vampire Lucia Borghesi is having a terrible century. Stripped of her throne and banished from Italy, she's now somehow found herself in a dispute with the local demigod of nightmares and terror. And to top it all off, the long-time city mediator has been assassinated and her second-in-command just hired a human to fill that role. If he wants to survive, John will need to prove his value to Lucia and her people while keeping that demigod from sucking San Diego into an unnamed hell dimension. And he'll have to work fast, because his beloved Corolla is parked curbside in Logan Heights, like an open invitation to the neighborhood's graffiti enthusiasts.

"Messy divorce? Check. Emotional stability of the involved parties? Questionable. Possibility of bloodshed? High. Yep; it was definitely starting to sound like one of my cases." In addition to being San Diego's supernatural mediator, John Smith is the city's least successful private investigator. Those two careers collide when what was supposed to be a simple infidelity case draws the attention of the local werewolf pack. John soon finds himself pressed into service mediating a separation between the pack's married leaders. Even under normal circumstances, divorce is hell. But when werewolves are involved? It's murder.

"Broken-Neck spat forth a stream of Spanish which no doubt contained disparaging comments about my intelligence. Or my appearance. Or my fashion sense. The only Spanish words I knew were the expletives my friend Mike had taught me. Even so, I recognized insults when I heard them." The White Ladies of San Diego are one of the city's supernatural powers, organized and led by Graciela. But now their leader is missing, and the Ladies have hired John Smith, mediator and sometimes-private-investigator, to find her. Which raises some questions: How do you track down a ghost? What if she doesn't want to be found? And if foul play was involved in her disappearance like the Ladies believe, how exactly? It's not like ghosts can be kidnapped . . . right? John doesn't have any answers. As usual. He also doesn't have much time. The White Ladies aren't known for their patience, and if Graciela can't be found soon, he might just find himself permanently retired.

"Do you do this sort of thing a lot?" "Fly across the world to defend someone from murder accusations with my own life hanging in the balance?" I shook my head. "It's less common than you might think." It's been several years since John Smith became San Diego's supernatural mediator, and he's as surprised to still be alive as anyone. A lot of the credit goes to Anastasia, the vampire whose relationship status with John can be safely filed under 'It's complicated.' So, when Ana is imprisoned for the murder of Tomasso, King of the Italian Court, John drops everything to go to her defense. If he can find the real killer-and unravel a centuries-old mystery in the process-his trip to Rome might have a storybook ending. If he comes up empty, he'll lose more than just the woman he loves. John has survived a lot of things-divorces, conspiracies, even angry demigods-but politics can be deadly even before regicide is thrown into the mix. This case is looking more and more like an Italian screwjob.

Now that he's back home in San Diego, life is looking up for John Smith, hapless P.I. and supernatural mediator. And sure, there may be a few flies in the ointment, like the little matter of an ongoing goblin war, the disappearance of John's chief mediator rival, and an ever-growing list of questions about the suspicious events of the past few years, but those are all topics for another day. It's wedding season and the sun is shining, the weather is perfect, and the early fall air is thick with the scent of, Wait. Is that rotting flesh? San Diego's zombie prince, Simon, may be long dead, but his descendants are still around and kicking, and one of them, his great-great granddaughter, just went missing. Now, Simon wants John to track her down. John has never worked across state lines before, but clearly that's going to change. And while New Mexico might not be quite as blissful as Catalina Island, it still sounds pretty sweet. After all, John and his friends have already survived gods, witches, werewolves, and the terrifying guacamole shortage of 2013. What sort of challenge could this case possibly offer by comparison? He's about to find out.