After Dark

After Dark is a novel by the American writer Jayne Ann Krentz, published in 2000. It combines a suspense plot and a romance with a setting in which psychic talents are part of ordinary professional life.

Lydia Smith is a licensed para-archaeologist, which is to say a specialist who reads objects and ruins for a living. A bad experience inside an alien tomb has left her seriously stressed and short of work, so she is putting in part-time hours at Shrimpton's House of Ancient Horrors, a museum with a small budget and a large collection. She has a plan to put her career back together, and it is not going well.

Then she finds a body in one of the sarcophagus exhibits, which is not something her employer is equipped to deal with, and her new client, Emmett London, turns out to be a man with a reputation for danger. The novel follows the two of them through the Dead City of Old Cadence as the trouble Lydia has walked into gets steadily worse.