This is the first in the author's Ghost Hunters series set on the planet Harmony. To begin with, I thought it would tie in with an earlier trilogy with books named after the heroines, who all have flower names, but although the background of the two series is the same, the Harmony books differ in several respects. Both deal with societies which have grown up on planets remote from Earth, which were colonised after an energy cloud appeared near Earth that enabled travel to far distant worlds, but which were cut off abruptly when the Curtain, as it was known, suddenly 'closed' or disappeared. On both worlds, the humans encountered the remains of an alien civilisation, possibly not native to the planet, which utilised psychic forms of energy, and on both worlds the humans subsequently developed psychic abilities of their own. But whereas in the earlier series the forms these abilities took were very varied, but all depended on a particular type of talent - known as a prism - to focus their talent so that people had to work in pairs, on Harmony, more conveniently, a crystal known as amber is used instead. 
 The story starts when Lydia Smith, who is showing her prospective client Emmett London around the third rate museum where she works part-time, finds the dead body of her friend, Chester, inside an alien sarcophagus. Lydia is upset, not only because Chester is dead, but because she assumes London will cancel their professional arrangement. But London does engage her to help him find a family heirloom, pawned by his nephew, who subsequently disappeared. He also ends up helping her solve the mystery of Chester's death. 
 A number of threads weave into the story. Firstly, Lydia previously had a promising career as a para archaeologist at the university, cut short a few months ago. She had supposedly wandered off when part of an expedition into the underground catacombs that extend beneath the local alien ruins - most of the larger human settlements on Harmony were established around the ruins of alien cities - and subsequently suffered amnesia following an encounter with one of the 'ghosts', the nickname given to the green energy clouds which can inflict severe mental trauma and even death on any human they touch. Such ghosts are found in abundance in the catacombs, and the only people who can deal with them are 'ghost hunters', mostly men, who can attune themselves psychically to the dangerous energy and either deresonate it (derezz in the book's parlance) or use a ghost of their own to cancel it out. The ghost hunters are organised into Guilds within each town and city, and most boys who develop the ability at puberty join the local Guild for training and spend time as ghost hunters, though quite a few eventually move on to other professions. Although the author tells us there are a few female ghost hunters, we don't meet any in this book. 
 Two ghost hunters, assigned to the expedition to provide protection, blamed Lydia for ignoring procedure. Before she knew it, Lydia was written off as a potential basketcase who would be a potential danger to her colleagues, since the medical profession found it amazing she had managed to hang on to her sanity after being lost underground for two days. As a result, a former colleague of hers who has since become head of the department, had her fired, hence her part-time job at the low class museum, and her current attempt to start a business as a consultant to the antiquities trade. 
 Apart from being a former archaelogist, Lydia is also a 'tangler'. The other hazard in the catacombs are 'illusion traps', dark fields which are anchored to objects, usually made of alien green quartz. For reasons best known to themselves, the aliens left plenty of these underground, and anyone caught by one is drawn into a disorientating mental experience which can result in permanent residence in a mental hospital. People who can attune their psychic energy to such traps in order to dampen them down and unset them are called tanglers. It was Lydia's ability which led her into the academic field, since any tangler who can afford it goes to college and gets umpteen degrees to allow them to enter a university para-archaeology department. Anyone who can't afford to do this, like Chester, becomes a ruin rat, as the people who earn a precarious living exploring the underground ruins to find saleable objects, are known. 
 The second thread in the story is the mystery around Chester's death and subsequent events which throw doubt on the theory held by the police that he was in the museum to steal an object to sell. As part of this, various characters are floated as suspects, including Emmett's former fiancee, who ditched him as soon as it became clear he was going to resign as Guild Head, and then promptly married the head of the Guild in Cadence. Everything weaves together in this, including the disappearance of Emmett's nephew. 
 The third thread is the growing attraction between Lydia and Emmett London, who until recently was the Guild Boss in another city where he had modernised the Guild and turned it into a modern business enterprise rather than a quasi-Militia. Lydia has a great deal of prejudice against the Guild after the testimony of the two members resulted in the loss of her career, so this is a big stumbling block in their ongoing romance. That, and her desire to keep things on a business level, means that the sexual tension between them is maintained through most of the book and they don't get things together until fairly late in the proceedings, which I preferred. I did although find Lydia's character a bit wearing at times, and sympathised with Emmett and his forebearance. 
 One aspect which will probably either charm or annoy is the inclusion of a little animal known as a dust bunny: a small fluffy predator with six legs and two sets of eyes, one for day and another it opens at night or when hunting. Most of the time it is quite cute, munching on pretzels and such, but does play a key role as, apart from anything else, one thing Lydia has not disclosed about her Lost Weekend, as she calls it, is that this dust bunny found her and guided her back to civilisation. This is the only example we see of any other lifeform: the author doesn't provide a completely workable world building scenario to explain why this animal would have developed six legs. 
 The book is a standalone story and does not resolve the mystery of what happened to Lydia, but it is fairly obvious that things are left open for a sequel. An enjoyable read, but not spectacular, so 3 stars.