Harry Turtledove has spent forty years dismantling reality to see why the wheels come off. Hugo and Sidewise Awards fill his mantle because he breaks facts for a living. Most people call him the Master of Alternate History. That title is just a polite way of saying he is the only man who can make speculative dread feel like a peer-reviewed paper. Now he is applying that same grit to the supernatural. Los Angeles is full of vampires and gremlins. Turtledove lives in the San Fernando Valley and treats these monsters like historical inevitabilities. Ancient demons and the ghosts of history both smell like old paper. Just shadows and copper. This is a pivot by a man who already knows where the bodies are buried.

For the first book in the series (Twice as Dead): "Wisecracking, biracial private eye Jack Mitchell takes on a series of cases complicated by the supernatural in this sharp-edged urban fantasy from Turtledove (The Wagers of Sin). In a post-WWII Los Angeles, Mitchell, a combat vet haunted by wartime horrors, investigates a missing husband who may have been turned into a zombie and a vanished half-brother who just happens to be a vampire. He navigates the city's segregated streets from the Vampire Village ghetto, where Jewish refugees handle daytime tasks for the incapacitated residents, through the jazz parlors of Central, where Charlie "Bird" Parker mesmerizes audiences, to the downtown centers of power, where corrupt cops shrug off grand jury indictments. Though the mystery elements sometimes feel underbaked, Turtledove admirably adheres to the noir aesthetic with his street-level focus on the resilience and resistance of society's outcasts. Readers waiting for Walter Mosley's next hard-boiled novel will fill the time nicely with this sympathetic but unsentimental tale of the ghostly underclass." - Publishers Weekly