As PRECINCT 13 begins, we meet Alex Connor. She recently moved to a small town in South Dakota after having undergone what she understood to be a mental breakdown. Alex has always believed in magic, even when others told her the trolls she was seeing under the bridge were just homeless people. In fact, the only person to ever believe Alex was Valentine, her boyfriend. So much so that Valentine tried to kill Alex's stepmother, whom she believed was a demon. His murder attempts failed and thus he got thrown into prison and Alex was sent to a psych ward to deal with her "delusional" behavior.

Alex lands the job of coroner in her new small town. During her first autopsy, strange happenings occur. Tattoos on the corpse begin to shift and move, creating new pictures and words. One particular snake tattoo becomes corporeal and bites Alex and then burrows under her skin, becoming her own protective tattoo. All these are very strange to Alex, but none more surreal than when the corpse gets up and leaves the coroner's office. Who do you turn to when a dead body goes missing because it got up and shuffled out of the building?

Luckily, the police chief sends Alex to PRECINCT 13, a hidden police district that solely works on any cases out of the ordinary. The office is full of people of the magical variety: fairies, mages, Gollum, familiars, psychics and the like, all keeping a lid on the magical community from the ordinarium, or non-magical folk. Alex is quite overwhelmed to learn that there are others who believe in magic and that she is quite possibly magical herself. The magical folks of PRECINCT 13 are currently working on several important cases, one quite possibly involving the dead corpse that walked out of the Alex's office. The missing dead man was believed to be a Necromancer, one who uses dead bodies to create dark spells, and there have been a lot of grave robberies in the community lately. Alex lends her hand as coroner and begins a journey of self--realization

PRECINCT 13 is the first book in a new series by Tate Hallaway. This book reminded me a bit of an adult version of HARRY POTTER. In this universe, magic is everywhere but ordinary people cannot see it. The magical people do their best to weave cloaking spells around anything they don't want to be seen. Even the offices of PRECINCT 13 are hidden behind the cloak of a spell to look like an abandoned building if a human were to walk by or peer in a window. Alex Connor is a strong female lead, very no-nonsense in many respects, but not some sort of indestructible warrior woman without emotions

Her sexy, dangerous boyfriend shows up in protective mode and does a good job of acting brooding and yet irresistible and he has a surprise for Alex that left me excited to learn more about this character. In fact, all the characters were well fleshed out and easy to visualize in my head. This book is classified as a paranormal romance, but it is more of an urban fantasy. There was romance and implied sex, but it was not the focus of PRECINCT 13. I am definitely looking forward to jumping back into this magical world once again!

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