Book 33, 2024
The Iron Hunt by Marjorie M. Liu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I brought my work book home yesterday to finish it. I had one chapter and an epilogue left. The book was The Iron Hunt by Marjorie M Liu, and it's the first in her urban fantasy series called "Hunter Kiss". The main character is Hunter, Maxine Kiss.
Maxine is descended from a long line of female Hunters. Their job has always been to kill demons that cross the veil and possess humans. Despite her vocation, Maxine is protected by five demons. During the day, they sink into her skin and are visible as tattoos. At night, they peel away from Maxine and do some hunting of their own. While the boys (as Maxine calls them) are on her skin, she is impervious to harm. It's only at night that she can be killed. Maxine knows better than to put down roots, but she has lingered with her lover, Grant, and worked with him to assist the homeless. Grant is a mortal and human, but he has uncanny abilities of his own. When the human police tell Maxine that a man has been murdered and had her name and address on him, she is compelled to find out how someone knows of her. What she learns is that the veil between dimensions has been compromised and that she's the only one standing between our world and hell on earth.
Liu's writing is lush and descriptive and almost stream-of-consciousness, as the story is told in Maxine's first-person point of view. I found the book evocative but not entertaining. It was bleak and violent and somewhat confusing. There was no immediate info dump, which was refreshing, but the world-building was done slowly and in fits and starts.
Favorite lines:
♦ "Devil always comes knocking like a bastard."
♦ I had not worn a dress since my mother's death, and heels would probably kill me faster than a zombie.
♦ "Thought is energy."
♦ "Insane people do not have polite conversations with unicorns."
Well-written, four stars