"Cassie Scot: ParaNormal Detective" by Christine Amsden / Wednesday, May 15, 2013 / Reviewed by Clay Stafford

Nothing delights me more than a new discovery and what delights me even more is that I found it from an independent publisher here in my own backyard, Twilight Times Books in Kingsport, Tennessee?

“Cassie Scot: ParaNormal Detective” by Christine Amsden is a promising debut of a new, everyday girl detective in a not-so-everyday world.

We can’t all be superstars.  That’s the case with dully normal Cassie Scot, the most untalented and unmagical of her magical family.  Life gives us lemons and some, like Cassie, make lemonade.  She decides to set up a detective agency in her hometown of Eagle Rock, Missouri, a real place it seems in unincorporated Barry County, population 1,200.  After reading about all the bizarre things that go on there in this book, it is definitely a place I think I would like to visit.

Six months after opening her agency, Cassie still doesn’t have a client.  Here’s where things get energized: she is hired in her first job to deliver a subpoena to a local witch.  Easy enough.  Her family has put her in those circles.  But along the way, she finds a dead body.  Then she becomes the target of vampires.  Add a sorcerer and you have a grand collection of delightfully normal (and abnormal) characters.  Like Carl Kolchak of my own youth, Cassie – because she has none of her family’s magical powers – is forced to fight the legerdemain of the underworld with the same set of skills we plain mortals have: courage, practical common sense, and sometimes unexpected good fortune.  That’s what makes her so identifiable.  She brings to the book nothing more than what we might, as well.

Like “Harry Potter,” this story and the younger characters who populate it appeal to a wide demographic and give us that world within a world full of delightful story possibilities.  This book is not just for adults.  I’ll be recommending this to my son.  It’s a fun story with a fun character.  I look forward to the next book in the series.

– Clay Stafford is an author / filmmaker and founder of Killer Nashville. Stafford’s latest projects are the documentary “One of the Miracles” and the music CD “XO”.

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