Trace

by Ian M. Smith

Joanne Shaughnessy needs a job, and bad, which explains why in the course of 24 hours she has joined a shady medical study on the chi of amputees with a questionable physician at it's helm, and agreed to buy antiques for an eccentric Chinese woman who seems to think Joanne has a supernatural affinity for it. She might just be taking advantage of two nutcases’s open pocketbooks, but when she stumbles into a cache of mysterious letters, she starts to wonder if Ming is right, and if she can actually hear the voices of the dead. To complicate matters more, she is being followed by a band of monocle wearing tech-heads desperate to harness her mysterious powers into unbelievable technological advancement.

212 pages, Paperback

Published January 3, 2016

Reviews

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fluffy sci-fi inflected urban fantasy, where your usual naive young woman stumbles into a world of magic and mystery. In this case, that world is the ability to sense the memories of dead people around powerful objects, as mediated through a cranky old Chinese woman, and pursued by a Glass-wearing tech start-up. There's a nice sense of Seattle as a place and Joanna as an amputee, but mostly things just happen, young women are cutesy and confused in a way that seems very XOJane, and the mystery of the secret world and its war doesn't really go anywhere.

[Jeremy Zimmerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smith creates a compelling tale of conspiracies and the occult set against the backdrop of Seattle. Must read.