Mystery, Mayhem and a touch mystical - Omens will keep you reading late into the night. 
 Read my Interview with Kelley Armstrong 
 Packed full of mystery and whodunit, OMENS is a wonderful mystery novel featuring a strong willed young woman coming into her own. Olivia makes quite a few miss-steps along the course of this novel but I couldn't help but root for her. 
 Olivia is an ivy-league educated, volunteering member of the upper class social elite. Being the only child of very rich parents, I found it no surprise she's engaged to a future politician. Then one night her mother informs her - she's adopted. But her birth parents aren't just your run of the mill parents that couldn't take care of her - Nope - they are convicted serial killers! I'd flip the freak out - wouldn't you? Talk about a massive identity crisis. When everyone in her life doesn't react the way she expects them to, Olivia hightails it, and ends up in a very peculiar town that is somehow connected to her family's past. She starts seeing omens and portents everywhere. 
 All these years of hiding my superstitious side, and suddenly I was blurting weather omens to strangers. A cat washing its ears meant rain? I'd never heard of that before, no more than I remembered hearing that killing spiders was bad luck or that a black cat was good luck. Even people without a superstitious bone in their body knew that black cats were supposed to be bad luck. - pg 113 
 The town is strange, and both it and the residents seem to have many secrets worth discovering. Now things start to get really interesting for Olivia when a certain man walks on the scene. So with the help, well maybe help is the wrong word...with the paid services of Gabriel, an intimidating lawyer who just happened to previously represent her mother, Olivia is searching for truths about her parent's alleged crimes. 
 The yummy but extremely off putting Gabriel really has a way of getting a person's back up: 
 I'm upset, and you see that as weakness, which you make very clear, however inadvertently. You say, 'Take a moment,' but what I hear is 'Good God, not this again.' - pg 234 
 Gabriel is a guy that will leave you wondering at first: is he a good guy or a bad guy? Or maybe just "What the hell is with this guy?" I like him, but then I adore the villains of stories just as much as the heroes. So figure out for yourself what he is. I must say one thing I'm very much of a mind lately that good guys often do bad things. 
 Olivia and Gabriel have a sparky chemistry that you rarely see done well. I could not get enough of these two! 
 "You're not shooting the cat. It would leave a mess." 
 "True. Also, the killing of small animals is the entrance ramp onto the serial killer superhighway." I paused. "Damn. I bet the cat knows that. He picked me because I can't hurt him, or I'd be fulfilling my biological destiny. So I'm screwed. The cat stays. Unless you'll kill him..." I glanced at him "How does fifty bucks sound?" - pg 266 
 OMENS is very much a mystery novel. If you are hoping for your next new urban fantasy from Kelley Armstrong you might be disappointed by how very on the light side of fantasy OMENS is. What it lacks in fantasy it kicks you in the butt with for suspense mystery. Don't get me wrong it has a strong vein of fantasy and mysticism running through it, but that is by no means the driving force behind this book. I loved the fact that it was all about the mystery and whodunit. For those of you that love that genre but also love your bit of fantasy this is definitely the book for you and indeed isn't a book to miss at all!