From the Bookshelf of Challenge Overload (PNR and UF Edition)…

[close] I'm very impressed. Usually the first book in a UF series leaves me unimpressed and reluctantly reaching for the next one in hopes of improvement. Not so with this book. Working for the Devil is the first book in Lilith Saintcrow's Dante Valentine Series. Dante Valentine (a female, as is her friend Gabe, by the way) is a necromance-for-hire. This book is set in a what seems like a distant future, but seems very much like the basic future a lot people use (ie. plasma rifles and hover crafts, and something that reminds me of Back To The Future 2, a hover board). In any case, it's also a future after what they call "the Awakening", which is when people accepted people with psychic abilities and began educating them in special school and registering them. There seems to be a lot more going on in this universe, but I didn't get all of it, but I was ok with that. Saintcrow skipped the part where she painstakingly spells things out and pretty much just left me to accept it. Which I did.

Sorry, I got side-tracked, Dante Valentine, necromance-for-hire, gets hired by the devil, just like the title implies. She forced to deal with her own prejudices when assigned a demon to assist her, she has to face an ex-lover whom has left her, and allow her best friend to help her, all to complete her assignment. Needless to say things don't go as planned. There are fights, arguments, spoken and unspoken emotions, a shifting of ideals, twists, turns and in the end I wanted to immediately start reading the next book, mostly because I did not want to accept the ending and was hoping for more. You know when you finish a book and kind of flip it over a few times just to be sure there aren't anymore pages secretly hidden somewhere, because you just want there to be. That was feeling.

I also like that this seems to be a series with an end. 5 books and that's it. I think that's good. Too many series go on for so long that even though I want to read about the characters forever, they seem to lose direction because the author is trying to stretch out and make another book. I think maybe knowing there will be an end possibly helped with the focus of the books! Of course that remains to be seen. There are 4 more and they may just go down hill from here, but I hope not.

Needless to say, I'm in, I'm hooked, I already made my list and set my alarm so I can stop at the bookstore on my way to work in the morning. I was thinking I would read just the first book and eventually come back to the series, but it looks like I'm going to be side-tracked. There are worse things.