This review was first posted at http://www.rubysreads.com. 
 Dark Oracle is a mystery novel, interwoven with paranormal elements. In particular, foretelling the future. The heroine is an oracle, and in the past she used her skill with the tarot cards to solve cases. At the beginning of the story, Tara has retired from a life of fighting crime for very personal reasons. She's scarred physically and emotionally. Worse, she's lost her mother, and severed her connection with the Daughters of Delphi, the women she formerly regarded as family. Tara's seclusion ends when her mother's friend, Sophia, comes to plead for Tara's help in the case of a missing scientist. Though reluctant (that's not quite a strong enough description), Tara at last agrees to help. 
 The case proves to be as important as the Pythia has predicted. It also brings Tara back into the real world, and it forces her to face everything she's simply eliminated from her life, rather than deal with. It also brings FBI agent Harry Li into her sphere. The romance between them isn't as intense as I generally like. There's a lot of tenderness and sympathetic feeling. Harry's a sort of beta hero. He has emotions and he reflects on them. As someone who generally prefers an alpha hero--who would rather join a sewing circle than even admit he had emotions--Harry didn't really do it for me. It's not that I didn't like him--it's that I didn't get that fluttery, swoony feeling I get over heroes I lurve. I want to say, though, that Harry's reaction when he finally discovers that Tara uses Tarot cards is totally right on. He doesn't flip out and think she's crazy (or, in the case of certain heroes, decide that he loves the heroine despite her insanity). What really flips him out is the idea that Tara might have let the cards decide how intimate she was willing to be with him. 
 Williams does a great job of creating the paranormal part of the story. Mostly, it takes place in the real world--our world. But within that world, there's a group of women, known as the Daughters of Delphi, that can predict the future. Each woman within the organization has her own way of seeing the future. For Tara, our heroine, it's the tarot cards. For her nemesis, it's the art of geomancy, of using the ground to divine the future. For the Pythia, the head of the Daughters of Delphi, it's pyromancy. Tara's reading of the cards reminds me of a certain period of my life when I thought Tarot cards were the coolest thing ever. I remember sitting in my bedroom with my door locked (because I didn't want my brothers or my parents to know what I was doing) and laying out the cards, trying to tell my fortune. You can imagine how well a fourteen-year-old girl can do that. 
 I'm looking forward to Rogue Oracle because the end of Dark Oracle gave me definite hope for the future. Oh, and I'm hoping to see lots more of Harry's Pops, Martin.