Liquid Silver Books, $4.90, ISBN 978-1-59578-370-7
Fantasy Romance, 2007

Onyx Moon Rising is meant to be part of a series called Nefer Investigation Force. Our heroine Tashana Rennix is a Nefer Guardian, which means she’s the enforcer on behalf of the Nefer Investigation Force to deal with misbehaving spooks when normal human law enforcers can’t close the deal. In other words, she is another one of those heroines and this is another one of those stories.

Tashana gets a mysterious partner, Sanjay Callen, but she doesn’t like it and goes stomping around whining like a child prone to cussing because she’s so bad-ass that way. It turns out that Sanjay is a dragon and that some kind of pendant called the Onyx Moon has decided that Tashana is its wearer and… uh, yeah. The problem with Onyx Moon Rising is that the author assumes that I am already familiar with the backstory and setting of her story so she drops in all these terms like Onyx Moon without giving me a clear idea of what these terms stand for. Instead of being allowed to read the story in peace, I find myself facing a new jargon or term every other page and have to spend some time figuring out what these things mean.

Reading this book is like trying to read a textbook concerning a subject that I have not much familiarity with. It’s quite a chore. And considering how short this story is to the point that it ends without being able to do much in terms of characterization and story line, I don’t think the effort made into trying to decipher this story is worth it. Perhaps the author will explain things more clearly in future books in this series? Since Onyx Moon Rising is supposed to be the introduction to the series, however, I can only conclude that this book hasn’t done its job well.