This book had no right to be this good! That ending?! I can't. I really loved how all the characters you encountered felt like whole people. Everyone in the story has a purpose and it shows in the way the characters are written. And it makes you want to jump into the rest of the series to see how everyone is dealing with what happened in this first story. 
Also, I love that the setting is contemporary, just with a little the rest of us are blind to.