My growing-up years of group homes in Wichita are history now that I'm twenty-four and on my own. I had a good job as a reporter covering the paranormal beat for WTCH-TV in Kansas -until a jealous weather witch forecaster forced me out. Now I freelance as an investigator in wicked, mysterious post-Millennium Revelation Las Vegas. Vegas was wicked, of course, long before the turn of the twenty-first century brought all the bogeymen and women of myth and legends out of the closet and into human lives and society. Now it is 2013 and Vegas is crawling with half-vamps and half-weres and all-werewolf mobs and celebrity zombies and who-knows-what-else unhuman.

My ambitions are simple:

One: Staying alive. (Being turned into an immortal vampire doesn't count.)

Two: Being able to make love in the missionary position without having panic attacks. (Whoever thought someone would aim for the missionary position?) Position hadn't been an issue until recently and neither had sex, but now I've finally found a man I want to make love with. Ex-FBI guy Ricardo Montoya-a.k.a. the Cadaver Kid-is tall, dark, handsome, Hispanic and my brand-new horizontal ambition. He has my back-and my front-at every opportunity.

And, three: Tracking down "Lilith Quince"-my spitting image-to find out if she is a twin, double, clone or whatever. Or even if she is alive. Seeing her/me being autopsied on Crime Scene Instincts V: Las Vegas one rerun TV night in Wichita brought me to Sin City in the first place.

Lucky me, Lilith turned out to be the most desirable corpse ever featured on the internationally franchised show. She had an early-exit contract to kill herself, so her star turn as a CSI corpse was supposedly a "Reality TV" dissection.