Working for the Devil by Lilith Saintcrow
Dante “Danny” Valentine is a Necromance*, and a good one at that. That’s why she’s chosen by Lucifer to do a little job and why she’s dragged into hell by Japhrimel for a meeting with the devil himself. She somehow manages to impress him and is given a task and a familiar – to find a fugitive by the name of Santino with the help of her new and unwanted companion, Japhrimel. Danny would like nothing better than to take Santino down – the last time she saw him, he killed one of her few friends and barely survived herself – but everyone else seems to want in on the hunt and she is soon dragging around Jaf as well as her best friend and fellow Necromance Gabe and her skinlin** husband. Once Danny’s ex-boyfriend and the mob start to get involved, she knows she’s getting close to the truth…
First things first, yes, that is her real name. (I checked). I feel I got gypped in the name department by comparison. Second things second, I’m not sure what I can say about this book because I’m not sure I fully understood it. Wait, scrap that, I definitely didn’t understand it. It’s set in a world that exists after psychics “came out” and it was somehow revealed that the Bible was nonsense (not sure whether those two things are related or not). The remaining believers in God are known as Christers and looked down on by most of society, who know better than that. Our heroine believes in Anubis and the Egyptian pantheon, because Anubis is her psychopomp*** and, when you meet a God, you tend to believe in them. Although Lucifer and demons exist, God and angels apparently don’t. The worldbuilding feels messy, there’s not really an infodump at any point to explain what everything is. And for a world that is set up as a future version of our own, it seems dreadfully primitive: people can be given a free license to kill whoever they want so long as it takes place as part of a hunt for an active criminal; the more potent psychics are often assigned to slavery or “breeding”, a life of ownership and being controlled by others. But I must insert a caveat, there’s every chance that none of it that true and I’ve seriously misunderstood what I read. It’s unlikely though.
I think the deathknell for me enjoying this book was this: I dropped it and the bookmark fell out. I guessed where my page had been and commenced reading from there, but didn’t realise that I’d missed out a significant chunk of the book for fifty pages. That’s a long time to read without knowing what’s going on and to think that’s normal, given what I’d read previously. I’m gonna give this an extra star as the benefit of the doubt (and a little bit because the author’s name is awesome).
*I’ve read the whole book and I’m still not 100% sure what this is. It’s definitely something to do with death…
** I don’t know what this is either.
***or this.
[...] and doesn’t really make sense. It’s not quite as bad as the world building of Working for the Devil but it’s not far off it. By the end of the book, the structural layers have been stripped [...]