Links: Author's Website / Show Article /

Allie Beckstrom knows that using magic always carries a price. It might be a few minutes' worth of memory, an all-over ache... or one's life; it all depends on what you're trying to do.

In Magic to the Bone, Allie is drawn into a web of supernatural danger as victims of magical malpractice start turning up. Magic always carries a price--but the caster isn't always the one who pays. The price can be offloaded onto another; that is what Allie is finding. As a freelance Hound (or someone who investigates this type of malicious magic-working), Allie's interest starts as professional... but quickly turns personal, when it seems her own father may be implicated.

From back of book: Everything has a cost. And every act of magic exacts a price form its user--maybe a two-day migraine, or losing the memory of your first kiss.. But some people want to use magic without paying, and they Offload the cost onto an innocent. When that happens, it falls to a Hound to identify the spell's caster--and Allison Beckstrom's the best there is.

Daughter of a prominent Portland businessman, Allie would rather moonlight as a Hound than accept the family fortune--and all the many strings that come with it. But when she discovers a little boy dying from a magical Offload that has her father's signature all over it, Allie is thrown back into the high-stakes world of corporate espionage and black magic.

Now Allie's out for the truth--and the forces she finds herself calling on will overturn everything she knows, change her in ways she could never imagine...and make her capable of things that powerful poeple will do anything to control.

(Source: Roc)