SAINT CITY SINNERS.

SAINT CITY SINNERS by LILITH SAINTCROW.

SOURCE: Given to me by a friend, I was only a few pages in when I realised that I'd been the one to read and pass part one in this five part series onto her.

BACK COVER BLURB: Saint City has always been Dante Valentine's home. It's where she grew up, it's where her dead are buried, and it's where she learned to hunt.

Now, one call from an old friend will bring her back to investigate a murder too close to home for anyone's comfort. But the one person she trusted has just betrayed her.

Sometimes revenge is best served demon-hot ... 

FIRST SENTENCE {Overture}: Japhrimel stood in the middle of the wrack and ruin of the Haunt Tais-toi, his long wet-dark coat lying on his shoulders like night itself.

MEMORABLE MOMENT {Page 58}: Here in Cairo Giza the pyramids were sonorous bass notes at the very edge of psychic 'hearing', throbbing against bones and visceral like a subsonic beat.

MY THOUGHTS: Told the story, part four in the series, began by repeating the last few pages of the previous novel and thus the plot was easy enough to pick up. I'm afraid I didn't find this to be the case but then that is no surprise when reading book one, Working For The Devil, felt like I'd joined the series midway through.

Taking into account that whilst I have read book one but not books two or three I shall be reviewing this on its own merits, as a novel in its own rights rather than as part of a series.

Poorly written. I found the words randomly picked out in italics for seemingly no reason puzzling. The repetitiveness increasingly annoying. Yes, we know Dante was a necromancer with a gem stone in her cheek, molecule-drip nail polish and sparking rings. That Japhrimel was a demon, not human. And oh my goodness, 'The Mark'. Mentioned more times that I care to think of, why the need to keep telling us these things? 

A novel perhaps more suited to those into world-building. Not that I found this aspect of story particularly exemplary but it certainly beat the woeful characterisations - Dante (so whiny a heroine as to be a pain in the ass rather than the proverbial 'kick ass' as is generally the case with this genre) and as for 'Japh'? Best described as contrary, an abusive boyfriend one minute, a shoulder to cry on the next. Far from making him a complex character all it did was make him appear, well, wishy-washy and inconsistent.