Modern urban fantasy book with an interesting variant on an old staple that I won’t reveal in this review. There will be an upcoming blog post describing how we got the book signed, but I’ll save that for my wife.
Basic universe setup: there’s a parallel demon universe and people with magical aptitude need to make deals with them if they want real power. The deals involve sacrificing people to let the demons experience our world, which means the mages are pretty uniformly evil.
Points of note: it’s a fairly dark book, not so much because of the fair number of evil magicians, but because the protagonists were willing to take fairly extreme measures. Some of them I wasn’t comfortable with, but I don’t think we’re necessarily supposed to be.
The magical sub-world was fairly well defined and made a good amount of sense, although the integration with the larger world wasn’t particularly covered. That said, the failure to work out real world implications of magic tends to be a given in urban fantasy, so I’ll accept that. One oddity though, possession was fairly big in the book and caused rapid deterioration in the subject; however, the fairly logical albeit evil solution of chain possession to save the original victim was never discussed. Maybe in the sequel.
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