Book review: A Demon Bound by Debra Dunbar

I’m a sucker for a good story about a bad guy, and they don’t get much more bad than a demon. There are limits, of course, and to keep my interest, such a character needs to be complex and compelling to balance their wickedness. Fortunately, this demon has both qualities in spades. A Demon Bound is about an imp named Samantha, or Sam to her friends. Or rather, that’s the name of the person she Owned and possessed upon her arrival in our world forty years prior. Sam has a plan to stay on Earth long-term, although her reasons for wanting this are never made clear. Perhaps this will be revealed in a later book in the series, or perhaps she doesn’t fully understand her desires either.

Sam keeps herself relatively wealthy by working as a slum lord, and she enjoys spending time with her human neighbor Wyatt. In completely undemonic behavior, she pines for him, even as she struggles to keep things platonic between them. Already, it’s clear that she’s a complex character, not someone who can easily be shoehorned into definitions of good or evil.

Sam’s good life is thrown into disarray with a series of mistakes. When her demonic dog is attacked by something powerful enough to grievously wound him, Sam investigates and is in turn attacked by the same werewolf. She’s forced to kill the werewolf, but she worries that the energy expended to save her dog and kill the werewolf will summon an angel to dispatch her. Despite needing to lay low, she almost kills Wyatt in a failed attempt to Own him, and then one of the werewolves approaches her demanding that she pay a blood debt for slaying one of their packmates. The price? Sam just has to kill an angel.

And things only get more complex from there.

I really enjoyed this book from start to finish. Sam’s behavior throughout is dangerous and rarely lets you forget that she is a demon. But she’s also willing to risk her neck for Wyatt, and for others, even though it seemingly goes against her nature. Wyatt is cute in a sexy bad boy sort of way, and he and Sam make a cute couple. There’s also a romantic triangle of sorts late in the story, though I can’t explain that without massive spoilers, so I’ll leave it alone.

The writing wasn’t perfect. I found missing commas or sometimes periods, and a couple of times the narration slipped from past to present tense. But there weren’t any typos that I could recall, and none of the mistakes hurts the flow of the story. For some reason, one page of my Kindle copy replaced apostrophes and quotation marks with squares, and that was a little strange because it doesn’t happen anywhere else. Maybe it was just a glitch in the Kindle conversion.

In any case, I rather enjoyed A Demon Bound, and I give it four stars. The ending leaves me curious to know more about Sam, her friends, and her angelic enemies, so I’ll be getting the next book, Satan’s Sword, as soon as I have the funds to afford another book buying binge.