Title: Spirelli Paranormal Investigations Episode: 1
Publisher/Author: Kate Baray
Pages: 55 pp
Price: free

Irascible and curious, Jack Spirelli is a hoarder with a high tolerance for the bizarre and unusual. That makes him the perfect fixer for the magical community — the deeply underground magical community, which wants to keep the mortal world in the dark. Unfortunately, cases are sometimes too big for him to handle on his own, so he has taken the radical step of signing on a partner/sidekick. A dragon is not quite what he had in mind, but Marin sure does come in handy when he finds himself looking for a missing earth witch and they are cut off from the rest of the world by a century-old death curse ….

I’m always on the hunt for new urban fantasies to read, and I was fortunate enough to stumble across the first book in Baray’s series. Even better, it’s free. At only fifty-five pages, it is a fun, fast, and exciting introduction to Baray’s fictional world. There are witches and werewolves and dragons and magical libraries — and there are fixers like Jack. When the mundane authorities can’t be called in, Jack steps forward (sometimes reluctantly) to take care of the problem.

There are four novelettes in the series, as well as the parallel Lost Library series. I look forward to reading them all. Recommended to fans of Jenn Stark, Annie Bellet, Juli D Revezzo, Deborah Blake, Jolene Dawe, and Ilona Andrews.

[Rebecca Buchanan is the editor of Eternal Haunted Summer.]