More Books than Time

Book Reviews - Romance, Fantasy, Science Fiction - By an Adult for Adults

The Thief – Megan Whalen Turner – Fantasy with a Touch of Greece

by 1 Comment

Author Megan Whalen Turner states she was inspired by Greece and used bits and pieces of Grecian history and geography to write The Thief.  These basic blocks plus good character development and an intriguing plot with unexpected twists made The Thief an imaginative fantasy while avoiding a retelling of Grecian myths.

The plot features Gen, a braggart and thief currently imprisoned in the King’s royal prison in Sounis, a smallish state south of Eddis and west of Attolia.  Gen made the mistake of bragging about stealing the king’s seal, then doing it and then getting caught, so he’s in chains and unable to escape.  We can tell from the get-go that there is a lot more to Gen than these bare facts – anyone who reads fantasies will recognize the noble-born-but-pretending-to-be-common character.  Turner doles out bits and pieces of hints to clue us into Gen’s real status but holds out the complete story until the end.

The king’s Magus retrieves Gen from jail to steal the Gift of Hamiathes, the stone that is the kingship symbol in Eddis.  The king of Suonis wants to Gift to force the queen of Eddis to marry him.  The magus has two younger men, Sophos and Ambiades and Sophos’ man Pol along on the journey to retrieve the Gift from its hiding spot.

So far this sounds like a normal quest fantasy, enlivened with humor and questions about Gen, and The Thief is a quest on the surface.  It is more.  The characters are well done, with betrayal, mystery, and a background of geopolitical reality that drives the magus on his hunt.  If the magus is right then the three countries must ally to keep themselves whole.  Turner left enough open to write several sequels but The Thief is a complete novel on its own.

Most of the libraries shelve The Thief under YA fantasy.  The book will appeal to teens but it has enough complexity and interesting characters that adults can enjoy it too.  It’s not long, about 220 pages, and a fast read without a ton of elaborate writing.  The small number of characters, about 12 altogether, keeps it easy to follow, no hunting back and forth to remember who is who.

Turner so vividly describes the terrain with cliffs, ravines, arid volcanic residues, olive groves that you feel you would recognize the country if you saw it.  A map would have been a plus.

Overall I enjoyed The Thief.  The tension between Gen and the magus, Gen and the two young nobles, and finally between Gen and the goddess make the book lively and the rich characters make it an enjoyable, satisfying read.  4 Stars.

 

Midnight Riot or Rivers of London – Ben Aaronovitch – Wizard vs. Revenant

by 2 Comments

One of the best lines in Rivers of London is Inspector Nightingale’s answer to Peter’s question about wizards:

“No.  Not like Harry Potter.”
“In what way?”
“I’m not a fictional character.”

Yes, magic is real; wizards are real; ghosts and vampires and revenants are real. Father Thames, the spirit of Thames upriver of London, is real as is his rival Mother Thames who handles everything from London to the sea.

My copy is titled Midnight Riot, apparently the UK version is named Rivers of London.  Don’t worry, it’s the same book and it’s good.

Plot Quickie

Peter Grant is nearly through with probationary status in London’s police and is ready for assignment to something – hopefully something more exciting than the you-are-making-a-valuable-contribution-Case-Progression-Unit where he would shuffle papers when he wasn’t creating papers.  Peter meets a ghost while checking the area where a man was murdered near Covent Garden.  Peter doesn’t believe in ghosts but comes back a few nights later to ask the ghost a question; that is when he meets Inspector Thomas Nightingale, the only wizard currently employed by London’s finest and in fact the only wizard in London (or possibly the only one in the UK at all).

Nightingale recruits Peter (anything to avoid Case Progression) to help him since at the moment Nightingale is feeling a bit worried about the lack of magical manpower and other problems are poking up that need a wizard’s attention.  We have a case of vampires, a brooding feud between the spirits of the Thames, and a spate of completely irrational, vicious attacks.

Peter works with his friend Leslie, a more successful copper of the standard variety, Nightingale, assorted detectives, Molly the vampiric housekeeper, the children of the warring Thames clans and assorted opera goers and tenors to solve the mystery of the attacks and return London to its more-or-less peaceful self.

Characters

Peter is great.  Midnight Riot is written first person with Peter the narrator so we see everything through his eyes.   Other people see Peter as easily distracted but from our viewpoint, riding along in his head, he makes perfect sense.  Peter makes intuitive jumps and he is curious about things that seem peripheral to others but are in fact quite important.

Peter is resourceful, as witness by his method to bring peace between the Thames’ families and smart.  He figures out who is harboring the spirit that is causing the distressing attacks and cruel murders and is able to time his final intervention to save the spirit’s host from bleeding to death.

We see Leslie through Peter’s eyes and her words and how she compares herself and Peter.  She is a little less finely developed than Peter but interesting and I’m looking forward to meeting her again in the next book.

Inspector Nightingale and his peers in the more mundane side of the London constabulary are interesting too and poke up just often enough to keep us interested.  Peter’s mum and father play bit roles and I’d enjoy knowing his unflappable mum.

Summary

Midnight Riot is the first in a series featuring our hero Peter Grant.   I enjoyed the tight plotting and character development and am picking up two more books from our interlibrary loan system tomorrow!

To Catch a Bad Guy by Marie Astor – Fun, Romantic Suspense

by Leave a Comment

Both Amazon and Barnes and Noble offer To Catch a Bad Guy (Janet Maple Series Book 1) for free (always an attractive feature) but what caught my attention was the cover.  Who could resist such a cute dog?

Janet Maple has a new job as Assistant General Counsel at Bostoff Securities, working for her old friend and semi-rival Lisa.  Once Janet arrives she quickly wonders why the company hired her.  Lisa herself isn’t busy and Janet has nothing to do.  Then external lawyer Tom Wyman shows up to zip her through Bostoff’s legal structure – which is extraordinarily complex – and Janet begins to wonder just what is going on at Bostoff.

Janet does not want to rock the boat, but being a smart lady recognizes that she, as a lawyer for the brokerage, is on the hook for the firm’s legal actions and discovers the firm is missing client paperwork.  Management tells her to to forget about it, but Janet suspects something is wrong, and with her sense for crooked books honed after years in the New York District Attorney’s office she senses things aren’t quite as rosy as they appear.

Janet quickly finds herself embroiled with the cute IT guy, dodging  Tom Wyman, digging just a bit under the surface, and worried sick about her friend Lisa and Lisa’s fiance.

Overall To Catch A Bad Guy is cute, fun, a fast read that catches your imagination.  The characters are interesting and I felt for Janet once she realized she was in a sticky situation.  Don’t expect deep character building or complex themes but do expect a fun couple of hours.

Author Marie Astor used To Catch a Bad Guy (Janet Maple Series Book 1) to set the stage for a couple of sequels featuring the same characters, the budding romances and have our friends take care of the bad guys.  I enjoyed To Catch a Bad Guy enough that I purchased two of the follow up novels.

The War of Words – YA Fantasy Fiction by Amy Neftzger

by Leave a Comment

The blurb for The War Of Words sounded so intriguing I had to try it despite it being YA fantasy.  An evil sorcerer has enveloped the land in a spell of confusion and unreality, sending mysterious shadows to battle the king’s army.  I love words, how could I not want to read a book about a war on language?

Main character Kelsey, whom the king assigned to the army, discovers a man burning reams of paper, each covered with a single word, during a battle.  She knows this is somehow related to the unreality but not how or how to stop it.

Kelsey works with her friends to find out the sorcerer’s plans and weaknesses, all while battling the never-ending shadows and trying to stay out of trouble with the army general.  Her friends are students at a school behind the castle wall, protected from the confusion spells, and an apprentice wizard Nicholas, his teacher Moss and gargoyle Newton.

Good Points

The scenes with Kelsey and the sorcerer, and the general with the sorcerer and finally the king with the sorcerer were well done.  Amy Neftzger imagined how words would look if we could see them colored as to intent and meaning, a very good way to show the tension among the enemies.

Neftzger did a nice job coming up with a plot that is a true problem:  How do you fight against a creeping sense of unreality, when no one can trust what they see or hear, when one’s words and speech are misheard and lost?  I would like to see her use this same plot idea in an adult book with better characters and interesting back story.

YA Fantasy Problems

The War Of Words jumped around, things seemed to just happen, it felt out of tune.  Characters came and went without introduction nor did we find any time to learn about them as people.  Kids took the lead to find the problem, devise the solution, then lead the fight, just as a kid would imagine things to work.

The book felt like a sequel, although the NetGalley blurb did not say it was.  Author Amy Neftzger’s wrote two prior books, The Orphanage of Miracles and The Orchard of Hope, in The Kingdom Wars series that used the same characters and back story.  Perhaps if I’d read those the characters would have felt real.

On the good side The War of Words did not have the romantic tripe that keeps slithering out of YA fantasy, no 16 year old girls who capture the hearts of immortal demigods, no love triangles, no gonadal driven decision making, no histrionics.  The kids were good kids who want to do what’s right.  That was a huge plus.

Summary

Reading The War of Words as an adult and rating it for adults I’d give it 2 stars. I would not have finished it had I not gotten it from NetGalley, but it wasn’t a bad book, just not a book for adults.

Trying to put myself in the reading chair of a teen longing for challenges and the chance to be heroic, I’d say 4 stars.  I don’t think kids would mind the way it jumps from character to character nor the sense that scenes were unfinished, discarded too quickly.  Kids would enjoy it more if they were familiar with the characters already from the other two books.

13 Hours – Attack on Americans – Defended

by Leave a Comment

The book 13 Hours is not:

  • A novel
  • A political tirade
  • An expose
  • An examination whether our government deliberately misled about the terrorist involvement
  • A prescription to avoid future incidents
  • A blame cast (although it’s obvious that there is plenty to blame if one wanted)

13 Hours is an hour-by-hour account of the time immediately before, during and after the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attack on the US consular office and CIA annex as seen by, acted by, thought and felt by the surviving members of the “annex security team”.  The security team members were ex-military men contracted to provide extra security to the CIA case officers present in Benghazi, Libya.

I was impressed by the care the authors took to avoid compromising security or blaming others by name.  Naturally they were furious about certain measures, notably that the local CIA security chief “Bob” (not his real name) insisted on relying on local Libyan militia and, per their narrative, insisted on delaying the response to the first attack on the local consular office while he tried to reach the local militia leaders.  They used matter of fact, timeline narration to show their incredulous anger at the delay, during which two American consular staff and the US Ambassador to Libya were holed up in a burning residence.

They raised several points simply by stating the facts and narrating their response.  For example, the consular office had no fire suppression or breathing masks, the local CIA chief seemed more interested in protecting the CIA mission secrecy than in responding to the crisis, the local militia were mixed quality and uncertain loyalty, and someone was able to fire mortars accurately onto the roof of a house-sized building.  (The authors stated a mortar team needs exact coordinates to be that accurate – which leads one to wonder how the attackers got those coordinates.)

13 Hours does an excellent job making us see the security personnel as people instead of as faceless contractors, or stereotyped ex-military mercenary hard noses.  They included several maps of local Benghazi and of the two compounds that helped set context.  (Before reading I had the impression the “CIA annex” was in the same compound as the ambassador’s temporary residence when in fact it was about 2 miles away.)

Overall this is a sad book with an unhappy ending.  The attacks killed the US ambassador, a computer expert and two of the contractors. The security team helped the few dozen other American staff to leave Benghazi alive.

Compliments to the authors for bringing a horrific situation to life via matter of fact, calm narratives instead of indulging in blame or rage.  4 Stars

Old Money – Outdoors, Mystery and Suspense in Mississippi by Bobby Cole

by Leave a Comment

Old Money combines an old plot line, the search for missing cash, with new twists.  Jake Crosby is our hero, but instead of the usual private investigator or detective, Jake is a game warden charged with enforcing Mississippi’s game laws not with handling stolen cash or murderous siblings.

Jake and his partner Virgil are called in to help the local sheriff investigate who assaulted a doctor in the woods after a day hunting and left him nearly dead.  This assault happens early in the novel and we circle back to it only later.

Respected federal judge Rothbone asks Jake to keep an eye on the Bolivar twins whom he suspects of trying to get revenge on him for sentencing their father to prison.  Judge Rothbone has an ulterior motive for keeping tabs on the twins.  He knows they are searching for their father’s reputed $3MM of fraudulent money and he would like some of it to pay for his wife’s grey market kidney transplant.

Jake and Virgil enlist help to bug the Bolivar twins’ home and discover that the twins are trying to sell a helmet from the De Soto expedition back in the 1500s that they claim their dad found on federal property.  The helmet is a fake and the twins are just trying to scam the buyer but Jake and Virgil don’t realize this and are pursuing the case because it’s illegal to take artifacts from federal property.  The FBI is interested in the sale because the buyer will use his own counterfeit cash to pay for it.

Plot

We have 6 players:  The two Bolivar twins (who are not above scamming each other), their dad’s old cellmate whom they suspect knows where the cash is, the wanna be helmet buyer, the FBI, the judge and our two game wardens.

The side scams complicate the plot and make the book more interesting, especially when we readers know that Jake and Virgil are hot on the track of basically nothing and meanwhile the judge has set Jake up to spy for him and the twins plan to murder their father’s old cellmate once he tells them where the money is.

The Judge subplot felt the weakest and could have been edited out to make a tighter, faster paced book. Cole added it to give Judge Rothbone rationale to point Jake at the Bolivar twins but the original cover story – that the Judge feared retaliation – was reason enough.  The Judge’s family problems didn’t add anything to the story.

The pace is fairly slow initially and accelerates the last 20% of the book with a super fast finish that mostly ties up the loose ends.  The good guys win and the bad guys don’t.

Pacing

I remember my 10th grade English teacher telling me to show, not describe, and it’s hard.  Unfortunately author Bobby Cole describes far too much.  The novel would be better is Cole replaced the descriptions of what the characters think and feel with actions that shows us those thoughts and feelings.

For example, Jake’s wife Morgan worries about the family finances.  Cole shows Morgan with her checkbook trying to pay bills and thinking of cost cutting she can do.  Then he gives us four paragraphs describing the situation and and Morgan’s worries about Jake’s career change from stockbroker to game warden.  We could have seen the tension with a short scene between the two of them.

I wonder whether Cole would have needed much less description if he had shrunk the plot.

Characters

Jake, Virgil and the ex-cellmate are the best done characters.  We can feel Jake’s ambition to make good as a game warden, to protect the wildlife and serve the outdoors.  Cole lets us see Jake’s chagrin when he discovers that game wardens get caught up in plenty of non-wildlife situations, including helping people cope with the weather.  It’s easy to see why Jake gets excited when he thinks he’s on the track of artifacts looted from federal land.

Virgil is coasting through his career but he isn’t dead wood and he too wants to serve the countryside and people.

The ex-cellmate is interesting because he’s an authentic con man himself, recognizes the twins want to get the secrets out of him then kill him, but decides to gamble on finding the cash himself.  Cole got the balance nicely between the con artist’s risk vs. reward equations.

The Bolivar twins are left as nasty enigmas without any positive qualities and the judge feels lifeless.

Overall

I didn’t realize Old Money (A Jake Crosby Thriller Book 3) was part of a series until several pages into the book.  I don’t think it affected my enjoyment of the story since Cole gives us plenty of look backs to set up the plot and people.

While I won’t be looking for more books by Cole or more of the Jake Crosby novels, this was a decent read.  Kudos to Cole for creating an unusual setting and characters.

For myself, 3 stars.  For someone more fond of mystery and suspense, 4 stars.

I received an advanced E book through NetGalley in expectation of an honest review.

Uprooted by Naomi Novik, Excellent Fantasy for Adults, Magic vs. Malevolence

by 1 Comment

Uprooted by Naomi Novik is one of the best novels I’ve read in the past year.  It has the emotional depth that adults enjoy along with the straightforward story of good vs. evil, magic vs. despair with great characters.

Author Novik  sets Uprooted in the kingdom of Polnya, a standard late-medieval place threatened by the neighboring kingdom of Rosya on one side and the malevolent magic of the Wood on the other.  The Dragon, foremost wizard of Polnya, lives in the tower in the Spindle Valley to guard against the encroachment of the Wood.  When the Wood takes over people or animals they are corrupted, lost inside of themselves and a grave danger to everyone.

Characters

I loved Novik’s heroine, Agnieszka.  She has internal strength that even she doesn’t realize and she’s not afraid to put her life on the line for people, especially her friends.

The growing love affair between Agnieszka and the Dragon feels real.  When they work magic together they blend their hearts and work together intimately.  Agnieszka can see beneath the Dragon’s scowls and snide comments and she knows he loves beauty, whether in people, or things or magic.

Agnieszka’s magic is very different from the Dragon’s.  Hers is song and ad hoc, nothing formal while his is sharp, crisp, clean edged and powerful. They are stronger together than separate and the intimacy grows each time they combine magic.

I’m tired of books with girls who are strong in the sense of physically strong, or extra special strong in magic or whatever, standard kick-ass types.  I like reading books about people who are strong because they have strong characters.  Courage, determination, honor, love, cherishing people, generosity and stewardship are all qualities that make people strong, and Agnieszka and the Dragon have these.

Plot

The book begins when the Dragon selects Agnieszka to serve him for 10 years – but he forgets to tell her he selected her because she has magic.  Agnieszka and everyone else assumes he will choose her best friend, Kasia, and she can’t fathom why he took her.  After a couple days the Dragon begins teaching Agnieszka – but once more he doesn’t tell her that’s what he’s doing – and she hates it.  Doing magic the Dragon’s way leaves her exhausted.

Agnieszka realizes her magic is valuable when her home village summons the Dragon to stop corrupted cattle and wolves, but he has left to attend another monster.  She stumbles into the type of magic that she can do – ad hoc, more wandering and less of a highway – very powerful.  She and the Dragon begin working together in earnest.

The plot is excellent, fast moving, with lots of intrigue and blind alleys along the way.

Mood

Uprooted is excellent at conveying mood.  We feel Agnieszka’s fear and loathing early, then the ever-present threat of the Wood keeps a sense of worry and drives her and the Dragon to develop her skills. Novik does a great job with setting the Wood up as a dark, evil force that is just there, never goes away, never stops being a threat even when it is not overtly challenging.  We feel Agnieszka’s terror when she fights off the wolves, when she rescues Kasia, when she flees the capital with the royal children, when she and the Dragon fight the Wood together.

Then the Wood turns and becomes more a normal forest, still a bit scary with dangerous, hate-filled creatures, but not the malevolent entity it had been.  We feel lighter along with Agnieszka.

Uprooted isn’t all danger and fear.  It has love and even quiet humor.

Other Thoughts

Like many novels with younger characters, Uprooted is classified as YA Fiction.  It is not.  It is a novel for adults, one that older teens will love, but one that we older people will find richer and deeper.

Be aware there are 2 sex scenes.

Overall this is 5 stars.  Excellent book with deeply realistic characters and a memorable sense of mood and emotion.

Personal Note

Uprooted is going to stick with me a long, long time.  It spoke to something important.

Something about the relationship between Agnieszka and the Dragon reminded me of something I read long ago but cannot recall, perhaps something by Patricia McKillip.   I kept hearing an echo but cannot remember what it is an echo of, rather frustrating since I enjoyed whatever the earlier book was and would like to reread it.

The Shadow Throne, Book 3 of The Ascendance Trilogy by Jennifer Nielsen

by Leave a Comment

Jennifer Nielsen kept the same frantic pace with The Shadow Throne, the final book in her Ascendance trilogy as with the first two, but this third book felt flat, predictable and a bit silly.  Jaron, now the king of Carthya, knows that Avenia captured Imogen only to use her as a tool against him, yet he insists on going himself to free her.

Of course he gets captured, then tortured, which was the weakest and least readable part of the book.  King Vargan and his army commanders vacillate between wanting Jaron to cough up his military plans, or to force him to agree to bind his country to King Vargan of Avenia or, apparently they just wanted to hurt him.

Jaron acts like a clever thief, not like a king and the book is weaker for it.  Some of Jaron’s escapades are entertaining, as when he blows up the cannons sent to destroy his capital.  Some escapades reminded me of the nick-of-time rescues in the old Robin Hood television show.  He has an healed broken leg the whole time he’s prancing around Carthya and Avenia, dodging armies, rescuing friends, blowing up dams.

The characters didn’t seem important, more like pawns set up to fill the action.  I didn’t much like Jaron, he was a bit too selfish to be the real king he felt he was meant to be.  The ending where he somehow pulls a rescue out of the woodwork was fun reading but contrived.

I read The Shadow Throne right after finishing the second book, The Runaway King.  It was sort of like the feeling you get after eating a bunch of Halloween candy, yummy at the time but you really do know better.  I mostly enjoyed it even while recognizing the faults and despite getting bogged down in the very long section where Jaron is imprisoned.  (You can read my reviews of the The Runaway King here, and of The False Prince here.)

The Shadow Throne: Book 3 of The Ascendance Trilogy is the final book in the series, and wraps up the loose ends.  If you read the first two books you’ll want to read this just to find out what happens but be warned, it isn’t as good as the first two novels.

3 Stars

The Runaway King, Book 2 of The Ascendance Trilogy by Jennifer Nielsen

by 1 Comment

As the title notes, The Runaway King: Book 2 of the Ascendance Trilogy is the second book in the Ascendance series that features Sage, grown to take the throw under his rightful name, Jaron.  (See here for my review of the first book, The False Prince.)  Jaron is threatened within his kingdom of Carthya, by ambitious regents who seek to push him aside or use him as a puppet, and from the outside by King Vargan of Avenia, greedy to add Carthya to his rule.

Jaron suffers from extreme foot in mouth disease, incurable optimism, self confidence and unbelievable skills he honed for thievery, climbing, undoing chains and ropes, pick pocketing.  The book opens with an assassination attempt that leaves Jaron an ultimatum:  deliver himself to the pirates who already tried to kill him, or see his kingdom destroyed.  Jaron knows the pirates work closely with King Vargan.

King Vargan offers to take a spring in exchange for peace, such a good deal, otherwise known as tribute or appeasement.  Jaron’s father had made many such small-seeming concessions over his reign, leaving Vargan eager to take the rest.  Jaron refuses the deal.

From that point on the book moves at light speed, with Jaron joining the pirates under an assumed name, intending to turn the pirates into his men, his allies.  An audacious move, it nearly works.

Characters

Prince, then King Jaron, is both a cardboard creature and a person.  He is most stereotyped when acting as a thief, the bold challenger, the escape artist.  He is best developed when we see hints of his true nobility and kingship, as when he realizes that to give into Vargan once means giving him over all of Carthya, with timing the only question.

Love interest Imogen is a little more developed in The Runaway King than in The False Prince, but still a little weak.  It’s not clear why she and Jaron fall for each other.  Princess Amarinda is better drawn and an attractive character.  Jaron’s other friends and sometime foes are interesting but secondary.

Thoughts About The Runaway King

The Ascendance series is fantasy without a trace of magic.   You’ll find no wizards, no witches or sorcery.  Books like this, set in semi-medieval kingdoms with fast paced action, depend on the characters and the interesting plots.  Author Jennifer Nielsen does a good job with both, aligning the series to the older teen audience that enjoys plots and fun more than vampires and dystopian apocalypse.

I was restless and looking for something fun when I re-read my review for The False Prince and decided to check out the sequels from our local E library.  I’m glad I did as this was perfect for the evening.  Adults looking for a fast, enjoyable read that doesn’t challenge with a ton of mysterious magic or oddball names will enjoy this too.

4 Stars for adults, 5 for teens.

The Long Way Down – Nasty, Demon-Filled Las Vegas Sorcery

by Leave a Comment

It’s hard to like a book when you don’t like the characters.  Daniel Faust, the sorta hero in The Long Way Down, is a Las Vegas sorcerer who earns just enough to keep a roof over his head but not enough to stay clear of the seedy side of the town.    Daniel works as a private investigator – not clear whether licensed or informal – and takes on cases involving porno producers, half-demons and murders.

Daniel is meant to be the Good Guy here.  He takes on a case to investigate the murder of a young porno actress, discovers she was murdered, and works out vengeance on her murderer.  The vengeance turns out far worse than he had planned and spirals out to wreck havoc on a group intent on opening the Etruscan Box.

The The Long Way Down moves fast, which is a good thing as otherwise you’ll feel coated with the gunk under your bathroom drain.  The characters are all unpleasant, even Daniel.  If you think about it, a guy who’s willing to impersonate a snuff film maker in order to have revenge, is not the kind of person you want to spend time with.  His heart is supposedly on the side of the good and the true, but his actions show a man willing to murder – but only in the name of righteousness – and to steal and to cohabitate with a succubus.

Sorry, not my kind of guy.

The characters are well done, although icky, and a few are too nasty to be believable.  The best part is the setting.  I’ve not been to Las Vegas but this felt real.

Most novels with creatures from Hell feature good guys who fight the demons; Daniel in The Long Way Down cooperates with his girlfriend/succubus Caitlin to stop the apocalypse.  Daniel is too fascinated with Caitlin to wonder why her boss, demon prince Sitri, wants to avoid the apocalypse.

I finished The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust Book 1)  mostly out of curiosity, but wish I hadn’t.  It left me feeling depressed and not at all interested in further books about the character. The blurb for Craig Schaefer’s second book, Redemption Song, has Daniel enmeshed in the plots of Prince Sitri in order to keep his “girlfriend”, succubus Caitlin.  Anyone with the sense God gave a gnat knows to steer away from demons and the schemes of hell, but apparently Daniel didn’t figure this out.  I shan’t be reading this one as it sounds even more depressing and with more unpleasant characters.

3 Stars