Laura Resnick is a friend of a friend. Specifically, my friend is the wife of a fraternity brother of mine, so we go back a long way. When you see friends of friends commenting on stuff on Facebook, naturally you get curious about that person. I asked my friend Cindy if the thought Laura would mind me "friending" her on Facebook. She said no, so I did. When Laura announced the release of her latest novel, I learned it was the fourth of her "Esther Diammond" books. Not wanting to jump into characters developed over three previous novels, I decided to follow the canon.
Unfortunately, Laura's first novel, Disappearing Nightly, is out of print, so I picked up the second, Doppelgangster, for my Nook. Laura said she put a lot of backstory from the first novel into the second to catch everyone up. She was right, I got what was going on pretty quickly.
The main character of Doppelgangster is Esther Diamond, an aspiring actress living in New York who waits tables more than she acts. Esther got mixed up in some heavy-duty occult goings-on in the first novel, and naturally they continue to follow her around Manhattan. She's in between acting gigs, working at an Italian restaurant that is, well, to not sugar-coat it, mobbed-up. While working one night, she encounters a Doppelgänger, or perfect double, of a mobster who is a regular at the restaurant. The mobsters believe that, if one sees his perfect double, death is imminent, and this guy ends up dying while Esther's serving him.
Esther immediately picks up a tabloid characterisation of a mobbed-up "chorus girl," who witnesses what may be the beginning of a war between two crime families. Enlisting the help of Dr. Max Zodak, a mage/wizard of the "Magnum Collegium" (an organisation whose charter is fighting Evil with a capital "E"), she investigates the doppelgänger sighting. Naturally, since this involves a Mafia family, one of the older hitmen who knows Esther joins in. He doesn't get "doppelgängers" calling them "doppelgangsters." A few more deaths, a few more doppelgängers, and some solid plot work, and the case is solved.
When I started reading Doppelgangster, my first thought was, this is like Misty Lackey's Diana Tregarde novels, and I forgot how much fun a series like that is. Esther's not a paladin-level heroine; she's trying to make ends meet while getting an acting career off the ground. High-level paladins don't often sit around in sweats, consuming pints of Ben and Jerry's ice cream, but Esther does that when she's depressed. She's managed to get caught up into some weird stuff that complicates a love life, and Resnick's descriptions of a worked-up, horny Esther are at once exciting and humorous. Throw in social/business interactions with mobsters, and Esther Diamond's world just gets more interesting.
Doppelgangster is a fun read. Resnick does her homework on the occult/esoteric side of things, so it's easy to slip into the world in which Esther and Max are fighting Evil. You look at some elements, such as Max Zodak's bookstore and see connections used by countless other authors (think Ray's Occult Bookstore from "Ghostbusters" for this particular location), but you don't care. It's like role-playing game material that often starts in the common room of a local tavern. Yeah, it's a standard setting, but who cares, the story's good!
My instincts were solid here, and I've moved on to the next Esther Diamond story, Unsympathetic Magic.
