The Given

Pettersson’s absorbing third Celestial Blues paranormal (after The Taken and The Lost) drags its protagonists through 50 years’ worth of emotional entanglements. Fallen angel Grif Shaw was a 1950s PI, and old habits die harder than he did. Unable to resist the lure of an unsolved mystery, he broke his own heart—and that of Kit Craig, his intrepid modern-day rockabilly reporter lover—to search for Evie, the wife Grif mistakenly thought had died with him. Pettersson cleverly integrates this complicated tale of love and loss with plenty of action and investigation: as Kit digs into a vicious and all-too-believable nursing home scam, Grif learns the reasons for his own murder. Pettersson’s skill at capturing emotion in lyrical passages sets her head and shoulders above her peers. Her finest creation is Grif Shaw himself, the man many women want and few women find, with a soul like a knuckle-scarred fist offering a single perfect red rose. (May)