by Sharon Tucker

Details on how to enter to win a copy of The Misfortune Cookie at the end of this review.

Yes, You Will Crave Chinese Food–but craving Chinese food is hardly a bad thing! Welcome to the Big Apple, home of some of the best Chinese restaurants on the planet and where we always find ourselves in Esther Diamond’s urban fantasy adventures. As you read, even if you don’t live in New York, go ahead, call in to order soup dumplings–Esther’s favorite–from your local Chinese takeout and brace yourself for a breakneck romp.

The Misfortune Cookie is Laura Resnick’s sixth novel in the Esther Diamond series, so readers will be pleased to recognize and welcome her friends, lovers and associates from the previous books. Suffice to say that Det. Connor Lopez is not Esther’s favorite person as we begin. What passes for their relationship is in a bad place and Lopez and his unit further exacerbates the issue by coming between Esther and her paycheck. Lucky Battistuzzi and many of the mob are still involved in Esther’s life and not in a helpful way. What comes to light is a Chinatown connection with Lucky, who is in hiding there for the better part of the novel. Fortunately, Dr. Max Zadok is still in the picture too and proves as invaluable as ever in sorting out the inevitable tangle Esther et al get into, and this time the professor conjures up a new character.

Some of Lucky’s associates in Chinatown have fallen under a fatal curse, so it’s up to Esther and Max to work around Lopez and the rest of the police to find out who is causing death left and right and to stop him. The only real clue is the gourmet, chocolate-drizzled fortune cookie each victim has opened just prior to meeting his fate. Here, as in all five prior books, Esther takes us into a different learning experience with things magical. Prepare to get inside a tong, learn a few pictograms and their meanings and even a bit about Chinese sorcery.

When I knew I’d be reading and writing a review for Laura Resnick’s The Misfortune Cookie, I indulged myself in reading her first two novels in the Esther Diamond series, Disappearing Nightly and Dopplegangster, before starting this sixth and latest adventure with the struggling New York actress. I’m glad I read the first two in the series before tucking into The Misfortune Cookie, but found that since the action in each of the novels runs hard upon the action in the previously published novel in the series, Resnick gave the reader enough info each time to make each novel immediately accessible. It’s kind of an author to do that.

I’m feeling pretty fortunate. I still have three more Esther Diamonds to read: Unsympathetic Magic, Polterheist, and Vamparazzi. With any luck Laura Resnick will give us many more in the series–but here’s hoping Esther’s love life improves.

To enter to win a copy of The Misfortune Cookie, simply email KRL at krlcontests@gmail[dot]com by replacing the [dot] with a period, and with the subject line “Cookie,” or comment on this article. A winner will be chosen December 7, 2013. U.S. residents only.

Check out more fantasy book reviews in our fantasy and fangs section.

Sharon Tucker is former faculty at the University of Memphis in Memphis TN, and now enjoys evening supervising in that campus library. Having forsworn TV except for online viewing and her own movies, she reads an average of 3 to 4 books per week and has her first novel—a mystery, of course—well underway.