For a Few Demons More – review
I have very few things I like to call, “guilty pleasures,” but I do have some out there. One of them, and one that I was excited to spend money on a few weeks ago, is Kim Harrison’s Rachel Morgan series of books. I’ve written about these in the past as I picked up her first book, Dead Witch Walking and loved it. Then bought the second book, The Good, the Bad, and the Undead, and, at the time, the third book Every Which Way but Dead and read them back to back. The last time I found an author I could do this too (outside of the Zachary Johnson series of books) was J.K. Rowling and her Harry Potter series of books… I read the first three within a couple of days and then waiting six months – plus – to buy book four.
Then there was book four, A Fistful of Charms , which only added to the guilty pleasures of the series. Basically, Rachel Morgan is a witch in an alternate timeline Cincinnati, OH where it is 40 years after a genetically engineered disease was spread through tomatoes killing off the majority of the human population. For the first time in the history of human/interlander relations, humans did not radically outnumber the interlanders and, as a result, fairies, witches, vampires, werewolves, and other magical creatures came out of hiding and started to live with humans side-by-side.
Enter Rachel, she is a witch who is an independent runner. Someone who is hired to go out and take care of others of her kind (witches, vampires, werewolves, etc.) that are getting out of line and need to be taken care – without killing them. She lives with a living vampire, someone born with the vampire virus in her system, but not dead, yet, like a real vampire. Therefore, the living vamp can walk around in sunlight and still has a soul.
In this installment of the series Rachel owes two different demons a favor. On top of which, the main demon baddie is in her church and is tearing it to bits looking for something. This causes Rachel to believe that Newt (demon) is looking for an artifact that will change humans in to werewolves. The weres in the community want that artifact to increase their numbers; the vampires want to maintain the top spot of the interland community. In short, the vampires want to sit at the top of the foodchain and the weres ability to change humans into werewolves would challenge that authority.
On top of this, different werewolves are showing up dead. Rachel’s alpha, in the were pack she is the alpha female for (witches cannot be weres, in case you wanted to be even more confused) believes he is changing women into weres, and is accused of murdering both the male and female weres in the area.
To top it all off, Rachel has finally found the evidence that will put Trent, an elf in hiding, behind bars for good – something she’s been trying to do since book one. Rachel’s 1000 year old elf friend, Ceri, is falling for Trent and Rachel’s roommate Ivy has been called back to her master’s side after he was released from jail to contend with Al, another demon, who was running rampant on Cincinnati.
Got all that?
Well, the basic premise of the series of books is that Rachel is a dead woman, she just doesn’t know it yet. Her father was killed, or just disappeared, when he went into the Ever After to look for evidence or DNA of the elves before they came to this side of “the lines”. The lines are lines of magic that run through areas. In this case, Cincinnati. In the first book it was expected that Rachel would just be killed because she’d chosen to leave the IS (interland security), or the police force for all of the mythical creatures.
She survived.
And then she was hooked up with a career criminal. Changed into a ferret and entered into an underground animal fighting tournament.
Then she ended up with the artifact that causes the changes to weres and ended up at the Great Lakes defending her status as an alpha female in a were pack by changing herself into a wolf to fight another female were all before helping kill a vampire to make the world believe the artifact (call it a Focus) was thought to be lost in a river but was really being stored in her alpha weres freezer (his name is David).
On top of that she flirts with her roommate over sharing blood, is dating a living male vampire, and, with the release of an actually dead master vampire, Piscary, her life is pretty much forfeit.
Yeah, lions and tigers and… oh wait, witches and vampires and werewolves oh my. In spite of the subject material I really enjoy these books. It is not a series of books you can just pick up anywhere and get all the nuances, but, if you’ve got the time and desire, it is definitely a series of books that are totally worth reading. I like them. I like them a lot.
Like I said, guilty pleasures.
Plus, Kim Harrison has done it again by creating another book that adds to the intrigue and mystery, resolves issues that have been hanging for a couple of books, drops more issues that will (probably) come back and haunt Rachel in future books, and proved that for the kind of series it is, Kim Harrison is someone to be watched (as a novelist) for the future.
As an aside, I am interested in seeing what she does when she tires of Rachel Morgan and starts somewhere else with another central character. Like J.K. Rowling, I think that we will truly get to see what kind of a writer Kim Harrison is once she gets past what is making her famous and into new, and for her, uncharted territory. On top of this, I’d love to see Rachel Morgan made into, at least, one movie because this is the kind of witch/werewolf/vampire movie that would be interesting to explore.
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