Midnight Crossroad

This is the first of a new series by Charlaine Harris, set in Midnight, Texas--a wide spot on the road to Davy, Marthasville and points beyond. There are only a handful of surviving businesses: the nail salon/ antique gallery, the gas-n-go convenience store, a small diner, a pawn shop, and a new age/magic store. Manfred Bernardo is the new kid in town, a sometimes genuine psychic who runs a largely con-based online psychic hotline. He is coming to realize that everyone in town has either secrets and/or strange talents. Manfred is renting his house from Bobo Winthrop, who owns/ runs Midnight Pawn. Any of you who have read one of my favorite series (Lily Bard) by Harris about Shakespeare, Arkansas (e.g., Shakespeare's Counselor), will recognize that name. Bobo has run away from a moneyed family in Shakespeare, but also from the shame of having a white supremacist grandfather who stole a lot of arms from the sporting goods store run by Bobo's father. Every white supremacy group in the U.S. thinks that Bobo knows the whereabouts of this weapons stash, so he is hiding out from them, too. Bobo lives upstairs from the pawn shop and he also has two tenants in the basesment: the mysterious Olivia, who travels a lot and has something going on with Lemuel, Bobo's other tenant who is--apparently--a variety of vampire.  Turns out the woman who runs the magic shop, Fiji, is in fact a real witch with powers, and has a cat who talks. The two guys who run the nail salon/ antique store are gay. The Lovells have the convenience store and Mr. Lovell keeps an exceptionally tight leash on daughter Creek and son Connor; Manfred isn't sure why Lovell is keeping a low profile, but he would love to get to know the enigmatic Creek a lot better.
The action is set in motion when the body of Bobo's former girlfriend, Aubrey, is discovered in the riverbed at the first and only annual town picnic. The sheriff's suspicions fall on Bobo of course, but both Olivia and Fiji have lied to give him an alibi. It turns out that Aubrey had ties to the white supremacy group from Marthasville, who had discovered where Bobo lives and sent Aubrey to get information on the weapons stash. When that fails, they send people in to bug the pawn shop, then to attack Bobo, and are starting to cause all kinds of trouble, some of which is dealt with and some of which is precipitated by Lemuel and Olivia. Then Fiji is kidnapped. She escapes through her own devices but the rescue party has arrived, reluctantly guided by Mr. Snuggles, the cat. The real culprit in all this, however, came as a total surprise to me.  Harris drops hints about other dark powers on the prowl throughout the story--e.g., Lemuel runs the pawn shop at night and has a "select" group of customers. This looks to be great fun as there is still lots to learn about the inhabitants of Midnight.