Rachel Morgan navigates through a world readers will find both very familiar and rather strange. Forty years ago, a bioengineered tomato led to a plague that killed half the human population of the world. Society would have fallen into the Dark Ages during the chaos--except for the efforts of the witches, warlocks, vampires, werewolves, pixies and fairies who have been hiding in our midst throughout history. These books are good--there's not a lot of literary meat here (and the covers are friggin' awful), but the characters are so solidly themselves, and the adventures so enticing, that I certainly didn't mind. Most wonderfully, Kim Harrison skillfully sidesteps the worst cliches of her genre. Kudos!