Stars: 2 out of 5

This was a letdown from book one, to be honest. I liked Quinn in the first book – she was foul-mouthed and irreverent, and as far from a typical urban fantasy protagonist as you can get. It was fun and refreshing. Unfortunately, the author went all in on that concept in this book. And this is the case in which too much good stuff spoils the brew, at least in my opinion.

Quinn is so snarky, vulgar, and unapologetically evil in this book that it stops being funny and gets rather annoying. Why would I care about what happens to her in this book if she is no better than any of the bad guys? If she is, in fact, also a bad guy who admits that she loves playing with her food and gets drunk on the terror and suffering she causes as much as on the blood she drinks? I like my anti-heroes at least somewhat redeemable. Oh, and that “yeah, I’m a monster, that’s what monsters do, get over it” attitude the author chose to endow her with doesn’t help much either.

My other issue is the constant breaking of the fourth wall Quinn does in her narrative. It’s fun when it’s done once or twice, but when it’s continuous, it gets old fast. Especially when you insert a freaking short story in the middle of the story… That dampens the enjoyment just a tad.

But the biggest issue I have with this book is just how stupid all the characters are. Yes, Quinn repeated several times that a detective she ain’t, but she can at least try to use her brains once in a while, no? Or all those other high and mighty demons, necromancers, and adjacent who want the magical dildo, what exactly was their thought process behind all this? Sit on their hands and wait until the artifact drops on their lap? Throw the most retarded of Mr. B’s minions at it and see if she can find it? That’s a bold strategy, let’s see if it pays off for them.

I kept waiting for Quinn to at least try to use the few brain cells she hadn’t fried with drugs in her past life to try to investigate this, but she never did. I mean, there is no real mystery in this story, no plot Quinn has to puzzle over. She just stumbles from one deus ex machina event to another (and even jokes about it, ha-ha) until she is miraculously alive in the end. And by the way, the author never even tells us how she manages that particular feat, probably because she ran out of ideas on how to make it plausible.

In the end, I was mostly irritated by the story and couldn’t care less who ended up with the magical dildo. Also, why would anyone even want this thing in the first place? It’s cursed. Whatever fleeting bliss it gives you, you forget the moment it’s over, so what’s the point? 

More importantly, I grew more and more irritated with Quinn, to the point that I didn’t even care how the story would have ended. I mean Quinn tells us halfway through that she survived to tell the tale, so even that suspense is gone out of the narrative.

As it stands, I have no desire to pick up the next book in the series.  I believe that Siobhan Quinn and I will be parting ways right here.

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Stars: 2 out of 5

This was a promising start, and I enjoyed the first three-quarters of the book, but it went downhill after that for a few reasons.

I think first and foremost, at least for me, is that I grew to despise the protagonist. She was mildly irritating at first, but I chalked it off to her upbringing and a recent traumatic experience she went through. The longer I read though, the more I understood that no, this was just how Ella truly was. 

She is extremely selfish, and she is very passive-aggressive when she wants others to do something for her, which is… all the time. She never pauses to think about the consequences of her actions to herself or anyone else she drags into the messes she creates. And, as I said, she gets passive-aggressive when they try to say no, or just brushes off their concerns like they are not important or valid. Because they aren’t to her, either important or valid, because nothing is more important to Ella than Ella. 

Case in point, when Damien, a guy who she met barely a few days ago, tells her that he is not comfortable breaking into a highly fortified compound on a pretend inspection because he doesn’t want word of this to get to his very influential family, she just… brushes this off? And the weird part is that he still goes with her. Why? Why is she portrayed as this special snowflake that all men (even gay men) fall over themselves to help and coddle? 

She also suffers from the TSTL (too stupid to live) syndrome, because she thinks with her hormones, not her brain. Like the decision to keep the reaper’s soul, even though it’s devouring her, just because she saw a vision of someone who might or might not have been her missing brother. Now she is persuaded that this soul is the only way she’ll find him. Erm, why? Did she exhaust any other means of searching for him? Because it doesn’t look to me like she tried all that hard. She even flat-out refused help from a licensed private investigator. Really? 

Or deciding to infiltrate a secure compound to “liberate” a gargoyle with a human stuck in it. All this with only 8 people, none of which are aware that she is planning a kidnapping instead of a simple inspection to make sure the boy is still alive. And the worst part is, there are no consequences for any of that. Ella does the most stupid and hair-brained things and the author just rewards her for this. 

In the end, I didn’t care about whether Ella and co freed Nathan from his stone prison, or whether she would survive the reaper’s soul. In fact, I was rather rooting for the reaper to win her over, so that I didn’t have to read about her anymore. Needless to say, I won’t continue with this series.