The Brass Bed is the first book in the Jewel Heiss series by American author, Jennifer Stevenson. Jewel Heiss is an agent for Chicago’s Department of Consumer Services. Her boss, Ed Neccio has her permanently assigned to cases involving magic: the Mayor gets upset when magic hits the news. But on the side, Ed wants her to find out what his wife, (and her best friend) Nina, is up to: he’s convinced this “therapist” she is seeing is her lover on the side. Clay Dawes runs a sex therapy service involving a brass bed. Jewel is sure it’s a scam, so she goes undercover as a client, and is surprised to have the best sex of her life, alone, in said bed. This brass bed, it seems, has been haunted for two hundred years by a cursed English Lord.

The alternate reality where apparently anger causes a pink mist, genies are addicted to Drambuie and pigeons steal cigarettes to smoke, is never really explained, and the reader may well feel like they have been thrown into the middle of a sitcom. But there is plenty of humour and the scenes with Randy are good, although the story drags a bit in the middle. An excerpt of the second book, The Velvet Chair, is included.