Review: Past Due by Elliot Kay
Past Due by Elliot Kay
Once again, Elliot Kay has come up with a superb threat for his growing cast of heroes to deal with. This time it’s a family of sorcerers who have been running around for 3200 years, dying, getting reincarnated, and then locating each other so that they could awaken the original personality in its new body and continue with their long-frustrated plan to rule everything. The modern world has made them much stronger because they can now actually get to each other wherever they happen to be around the globe.
Alex, Rachel, and Loreli are alerted to this danger by the return of the jinn, Zafirah, to whom Alex owes a favor. Zafirah is an interesting character, known as the thief of heaven, she once successfully stole something from a heavenly library, but tends to come out slightly on the side of good. That doesn’t mean she is altruistic in her interest in this sorcerer family—she has her own agenda—but she also truly wants to see them stopped.
Once again the supporting heroes get a lot of screen time in this book, especially Onyx, who has a very good storyline. There is a major party in the middle of the book in which tons of bad guys have come together to plot the end of the world and frankly I thought the story dragged quite a bit for much of it, but the secrets revealed here make it worth hanging in there. The fate of the world is on the line, plus we discover the roots of yet another plot for future novels.
Perhaps the best thing to come out of this novel in terms of the overall series is the question of what is going on with the majority of the angel leadership. The Dominion of Vancouver chooses not to take action, allegedly because he doesn’t believe Loreli. His angels know that vampires, werewolves, and much much more are in Vancouver but choose to ignore this just as the original Dominion did in Seatle, and others do around the world. It really makes us wonder why so many Dominions are preventing the heavenly host from fighting back against all of the encroaching evil. It looks to me like Kay may be setting the stage for a second rebellion in heaven which I’m sure our heroes will be right in the middle of stopping.
