Blue Diablo: A Corine Solomon Novel by Ann Aguirre

Please note: Links pointing to Amazon contain my affiliate ID. Sales resulting from clicks on those links will earn me a percentage of the purchase price. So buy and read now!

Summary: A psychic tracks down her ex’s missing mother.

Corine Solomon has a gift. Or maybe it’s a curse. She can tell the history of an object by holding it in her palm. That’s the reason why her hands are so scarred and burnt and also why she’s been hiding in Mexico for the past two years.

But when her ex-boyfriend Chance tracks her down and begs her to save his mother, who was the primary mother figure in Corine’s short, rough life, Corine knows it will hurt her both physically and emotionally. She agrees to use her powers as long as Chance helps her hunt down the people who killed her mother. A spell cast at the moment of Corine’s mother’s death actually gave Corrine her powers. Corine grew up in isolation and loneliness until Chance and his mother became the closest thing Corine had to a family, after years of abuse in foster care.

Chance and Corine once made a great psychic team, but Corine left after feeling used by Chance’s greed. He would take lucrative cases using their talents, but Corine would be traumatized physically and emotionally. After one particularly tough case (where they didn’t find the missing girl’s body), Corine runs away. She’s made a pretty nice, if boring, life for herself in Mexico. Until Chance comes walking back in. When he offers her revenge, Corine can’t refuse.

The writing in this book was sometimes laugh out loud funny and sometimes just quirky and crude:

“What he would have said, I’ll never know because his cell rang. Looking apologetic, he answered (he’d once taken a call while receiving a particularly artful blow job). That too was vintage Chance and I scurried like a nervous gerbil back to the kitchen, where I occupied myself washing up the few dishes I dirtied."

or

“Nice face, I decided, if scruffy and unshaven. Frosting the hunk cake was a tousled mess of tawny sun streaked hair.”

I just like the sound of a frosted hunk cake.

During the investigation, Corine starts to meet people with extra talents and you’ll feel encouraged when you feel like she won’t be alone anymore. But when their friends’ bodies are taken over by some mind control trick and they are helped by a wheel-chair bound psychic in Britain, I just lost interest.