Lilith Saintcrow
Night Shift
Orbit. 2008
Earlier this year I reviewed Saintcrow’s Working for the Devil. For me, Night Shift is a slightly better book although there are aspects which are not to my personal taste.
It is the story of Jill Kismet, the resident demon hunter in the city of Santa something-or-other. I know the name was mentioned in the text somewhere but I can’t find it again. Not that it matters. Jill deals with (in her own words) nonstandard exorcisms, Traders, hellbreed, rogue Weres, scurf (don’t ask), Sorrows, Middle Way adepts and anything else the nightside can throw up.
Like Dante Valentine in Working for the Devil she is very competent at fighting and she kills lots and lots of things in the course of the book. Fortunately they are all evil so that’s all right. And she’s very fond of children.
I’m falling into sarcasm again which is unfair because the book doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is - a jolly "kick-arse" (or "kick-ass" if you prefer) story of a girl who kills demons and saves the city. The old town-tamer story that drove a thousand westerns and none the worse for that.
Jill has made a bargain with a powerful demon named Pericles. He has given her demon-like powers but in return she has to give him a couple of hours of her time per month. The sessions are bad but could be much worse and the demon is continually playing mind games with her. She finds this even worse than the monthly sessions. This aspect of the book is good and raises it above Working for the Devil.
For the rest it is non-stop action as Jill fights off a succession of nasties while trying to find the truth behind the rogue Were and the demon lady who are terrorising the city. On her side are some good monsters (were-thingies - mostly feline), a white magician who keeps her house as a Sanctuary, and a supporting cast of police and forensics who are there mainly to make sure the bodies are dealt with in a tidy and timely manner. The aforementioned Pericles may or may not be on her side - he is rather ambiguous.
If this sort of story appeals to you it’s not a bad example of the genre. I don’t much care for the genre myself which may mean it is better than I give it credit for. I don’t think fans will be disappointed. Three stars.
Liz Williams
Snake Agent
Night Shade Books 2008 (original edition 2005)
Inspector Chen is a police detective in "Singapore Three" - one of a series of artificial islands. His special responsibility is for crimes involving the supernatural and for liaison with Hell. His wife is a demon who has a pet badger-spirit disguised as a teapot.
Young girls are dying and their spirits are not ending up in Heaven as they should be but are cropping up in some very strange places in Hell.
Enter Zhu Irzh, a demon officer with Hell’s Vice Squad. Some influential characters in Hell have caused him to stop promoting vice and work out what is going on with these young girls. He and Chen must work together and fight their way through the labyrinthine bureaucracies of Hell and back.
I enjoyed this book in parts. Williams’ vision of Hell as warring bureaucracies of mind-boggling inefficiency is entertaining and amusing. The ill-matched buddy story of Chen and Zhu Irzh works quite well also.
However, I wasn’t completely convinced by the Chinese cultural aspect although I am no expert here. The sinister demon hunter didn’t really go anywhere and in any case lost a certain credibility when the teapot bit his ankle and Chen’s wife pushed him into the harbour.
The supernatural part had a slightly pasted-on feel. The story could pretty much have been the same if we were talking the criminal underworld rather than the demonic one although the chrome would have been different. Substitute kidnapping for spirit-stealing, rival gangs for rival bureaucracies, weapons and lockpicks for magic and there you are.
Nevertheless not a bad read for train, plane or rainy day. Williams has written lots of other stuff since this book was first published in 2005 and I suspect that subsequent Inspector Chen outings will be better. I’d certainly give them a try. Three stars.
Lisa Lutz
Curse of the Spellmans
Simon and Schuster 2008
Curse of the Spellmans is the sequel to The Spellman Files which was published in 2006. I didn’t review the original (Imperial Purple didn’t exist then) but I enjoyed it a lot. As well as being smart and sassy it had a surprising amount of real human feeling in it - particularly in the relationship of the central character (Isabel (Izzy) Spellman) and her little sister, Rae.
I am happy to say that Lutz has kept up the good work. Possibly spending two years on the book rather than rushing it out in a year has helped. Certainly it has a polished feel to it.
The Spellmans are a disfunctional family of Private Investigators. They compulsively spy on each other, record each other’s conversations and follow each other around, eager to acquire whatever is needed to blackmail the other before being blackmailed in turn. Izzy has noticed suspicious things happening with her family - her Dad is going to the gym and eating tofu, her Mom sneaks out in the night to vandalise motorbikes, her big brother David has abandoned his law business and sits around all day drinking and her little sister Rae is pestering a policeman old enough to be her father and has just run him over with her car. Oh yes, and her best friend has run away and refuses all contact.
All this is nothing compared to the suspicious behaviour of their new neighbour. What else can you say of a man who keeps his office locked, even when he is the only one there; who shreds his correspondence and puts different parts of it into the garbage separately thereby making it impossible to reconstruct; whose very household waste has nothing suspicious in it? Women he contacts just disappear. Is he using his cover as a landscape gardener to hide the bodies?
Izzy is determined to work it all out. Nothing, not even being arrested four times (twice at the behest of her own family), is going to stop her. You’ll have to read it yourself to get the plot details - I’m not going to spoil it for you - but suffice to say that all is revealed and wrapped up exceedingly well.
A worthy successor to an excellent first book. Go and buy it. Four stars.
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