Hard Magic (The first book in the Paranormal Scene Investigations series) A novel by Laura Anne Gilman

Dear Reader,

Sometimes the most colorful characters are the ones you don’t plan for. When Bonnie Torres first appeared in the Retrievers series, she was a walk-on character, a bit player.

Bonnie, though, wasn’t having any of it. She insisted on playing a larger part, becoming part of the ongoing story. And then, when I paused for breath, she insisted on getting her own story, “Illumination” in the anthology Unusual Suspects. And then she demanded the chance to tell her own adventure—and that of her fellow PUPIs, the Private, Unaffiliated Paranormal Investigators of the Cosa Nostradamus.

New York City’s a tough place for a twentysomething Talent to make her mark. But I suspect Bonnie’s up to it….

Laura Anne Gilman

For Sioux. Who else?

You might say that it all started with a phone call, that morning in my hotel room. Only it didn’t, not really. The wheels of my life were in motion long before then. Before the first murders, before the first job. Before I had ever heard of PUPI: before there was a PUPI for anyone to hear of. Before all hell broke loose, and the Cosa Nostradamus was almost destroyed…

For me it started years earlier, when I was still in college, and my dad had gone missing for the last time, with just a cryptic letter left behind, and with a stranger listening in on my thoughts. That was when my life changed, when everything that was to come, began.

But I didn’t make the connection, not then, and not for a while later.

I’m better at putting the pieces together, now. I have to be.

It’s what I’m trained to do.

The world changes.

If you’re lucky, you know it’s happening.

If you’re really lucky, you know you’re part of it.

This is my part.