Having devoured the first Demon Trappers book I absolutely could not wait to get my hands on the second instalment in the series.
The result: A resounding ehhh.

Don't get me wrong, it's not at all a bad book, but Riley seems to spend most of the book floundering around accomplishing nothing, the plot of this book is slightly flimsy compared to that of the first book.

One thing this book does well, and better than a lot of recent books I have read, is give us time with the characters. Luckily Jana Oliver has written characters it's easy to care about.

Beck is by far my favourite character and he gets a lot of time in this book. We spend a lot of time in his head in this book and none of it is wasted and most importantly the crappy hand he's dealt isn't the same crappy hand every other character in every other YA book is dealt.

Which leads me nicely to Riley. The loosing parents thing is so overdone in YA fiction at the moment that it has become trite to the point of tedium. But if you can ignore that particular complaint then Riley is a likeable character who at least tries to tackle her problems head on rather than sit in the corner and cry about them.

Then we've got the cast of supporting characters all of whom have their own arcs. There's Ori, Harper, Simon and Peter, all of whom grow over the course of the book. Although be prepared to despise Simon, and for no adequately explained reason. Jana Oliver has thrown Simon to the wolves for no other reason than to move the plot along, I hope it is explained more in the next book.

That's the characters out of the way, so what actually happens in the book? That's the problem, not very much happens at all. The plot only actually moves along in the last quarter of the book. It seems that way in the middle of most trilogies now, but this book seems to suffer from it worse than others. What little plot advancement that does happen though is strong. There's a nice twist about half way through the book which is treated with scepticism by Beck, and consequently by the reader. The twist only actually gets confirmed right at the end when Riley does something very stupid indeed.

So, I've been quite hard on this book, it could easily have been a four star book, but I don't think it did quite enough to earn that fourth star. The first book got four, and this one isn't as good as that, so three seems like the correct rating. But don't take from the rating that this book isn't worth your time, because it absolutely is. If you like the first book then this is more or less required reading. The characters are well written and you'll enjoy spending time with them, just a shame that they don't do much advancing of the plot.