“10 years after publishing, I still lose my mind when you ask me what the book’s about” -Laurie Perez

In 2013, Perez had a vision that imprinted what she describes as “a sudden, vague knowledge of a character,” an off-brand kind of under-the-radar superhero who has a “gift” for seeing into people and communicating with them beyond the superficial Ego.

This character could trespass behind the veil to interact directly with living, breathing people at the level of the Soul.

In the beginning, I didn’t know her name and I didn’t know what the impact of this gift would be on the people she interacted with or how it would rewire her own sense of self. I only felt an acute awareness of her existence and a few basic details about her.

Early in 2014, I officially committed to the task of writing a novel for Amie Martine….The process of discovery turned out to be one of the most rewarding experiences of my creative life.

Read Perez’s full story: I’m Blowing it Again, 3.19.2026

THE AMIE SERIES: Speculative Fiction TRILOGY

Genre-bending, “luminous,” hypnotic and compelling, Amie Martine’s story evolved into THE LOOK OF AMIE MARTINE and that launched a speculative fiction trilogy with must-read sequels, THE POWER and THE COSMOS.

At its heart, this is the experience of a woman who, seven years before the story begins, survived a kind of death in Iceland and emerged with an extraordinary ability she calls "The LOOK."

She can sneak into people's souls, read the blueprints of their inner lives, and shift what she finds there.

Within twenty pages you realize you've stepped into something that isn't going to leave you the way it found you.

That's the Amie Martine trilogy. And the most honest thing I can tell you is that the first book, The LOOK, brazenly defies description — not because it's obscure or difficult, but because it accomplishes something rare: it makes the extraordinary feel absolutely, mundanely real, and then uses that realness to knock the floor out from under you.

Working with a cast of characters that includes A-list actors, filmmakers, assassins, historical warlords, Irish poets, Sufi masters, midwives, UN peacekeepers, mythic legends and real-world thugs all placed in the mind-bending context of spherical time and trespassing souls, the series manages to wrap a love story in the texture of a supernatural thriller that unravels and reinvents the paradigms that compose our philosophies of life, birth, grief and human consequence.

Strange, strange, strange.
Strangely intimate.
Strangely nuclear and cosmic at the same time…

Strangely euphoric in the way it hits secret passworded buttons that open niches, cracks and gates to hidden gardens in the mind that unveil insights.

Beautiful.
— Praveer S., in a 2016 email to the author

What the series is doing, beneath the plot and the mythology and the gorgeous texture of its locations is quietly revealing that the soul is not a metaphor. That compassion is not a virtue but an up-leveled physics. That what happens when you connect with another person, really look, is an encounter with something that cannot be contained in either of you separately. That grief is real and costly and not sacred. That love is not a pastel feeling, but a structural scaffold of existence.

Perez has done the patient, intricate work of making you care about specific humans in specific rooms eating specific foods and making specific jokes before it asks you to consider what happens when someone who loves those humans is capable of bending matter with intention and has been — all along, from before any of this started — the person who built the workshop where souls learn to be more than they were.

You'll want to read it again. Which is, perhaps, the point. The prologue of the first book tells you as much: "you will instantly and irrevocably forget my hushed invasion of your soul."

The second time through, you won't forget quite as completely. Which is exactly how it works.

Coming soon in 2026: Omnibus Edition

To celebrate the ten year anniversary of THE LOOK, E+M is excited to announce an omnibus edition will be released this Fall, placing all three novels together in one book. Stay tuned for AN UNDERWORLD I WANTED by Laurie Perez.