PsyCop: Partners by Jordan Castillo Price. 276 p.
This is an omnibus of two short novels, originally published as Among the Living and Criss Cross. (Obviously very short novels, given the page count.) Vic, the narrator, is a psychic who can hear ghosts. He works for the Chicago police department as a PsyCop, part of a two-man team where his partner is someone with no psychic talent whatsoever--that way, if some freaky psychic mojo incapacitates the psychic half of the team, the other person will be immune. Vic, who's gay but not out at work, meets Jacob, a really hot (and out) cop who's the non-psychic half of a different PsyCop team. Vic and Jacob start a personal relationship, and Vic ends up working with Jacob and his partner to track down a serial killer. In the second book, Vic starts seeing ghosts as well as hearing them, plus he starts attacking Jacob in his sleep.
These stories are awfully short. The setting is mildly intriguing, but it's not fleshed out at all; I don't think we even find out that they're set in Chicago until the second story. Vic pretty much says "I'm a cop" and the reader has to fill in everything else, based on every generic cop show you've ever seen. The psychic bits get more attention, of course, but even the background for that is left really fuzzy. I'm not advocating paragraphs of infodump about the worldbuilding, but a little more detail would have been a very good thing. I believe the book is marketed as romance, not mystery, so I wasn't expecting a police procedural, but even the sex scenes are pretty perfunctory. Vic's internal monologue about Jacob is mostly about how he doesn't know what Jacob thinks about the relationship, and how they haven't talked about this thing or that thing. And then they continue to not talk.
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