Discount Armageddon –Seanan McGuire, 2012.  4.5/5

Braving your bogeyman of a boss—literally—and dealing with dragons under Manhattan are all in a day’s work for cryptozoologist Verity Price in this first installment of McGuire’s InCryptid series.

Verity shares her shoebox of an apartment, (a semi legal sublet from a Sasquatch) with a colony of fervently celebratory talking mice. She gets by waitressing at a strip club and dreaming of a professional ballroom dancing career. That’s the normal side of Verity’s life.

The…abnormal…side of her life? She’s the local protector of cryptids: supporting and protecting monster and human communities from each other.

Not only is Verity a mad-skilled free runner, and a serious weapons specialist, but she can kill a man—or monster—six ways from Sunday. It runs in the family. Once a part of the fanatical, hidebound Covenant, which believes the only good cryptid is a dead one, the Price family went rogue generations ago when they realized cryptids had as much right to be in the world as any human.

Now, Covenant member Dominic De Luca is in town for his first solo mission. Verity and Dominic’s explosive mutual animosity is complicated by equally fiery mutual attraction. But the two face a bigger problem: cryptid virgins are disappearing at an alarming rate, weird lizard men are prowling the sewers, and there are rumors of a dragon sleeping beneath the city.

Discount Armageddon is great fun. McGuire skillfully builds a rich, urban cryptid world, tucking it seamlessly alongside the mundane city-life of ignorant humans. Excitingly unique monsters good, bad, and indifferent abound. A back matter “Field Guide” to NYC cryptids offers tongue-in-cheek details (in case you need help identifying a ghoul at your local bar). The characters—human and otherwise—are great, too, brought to life with breezy dialogue and a touch of surreal humor. Verity herself is skilled and sassy, with a tender heart under all that armament. The plot races along to a highly satisfying conclusion. Yes! At last! I can’t wait to get ahold of the next book.