RogerBW's Blog

2015 urban fantasy, fourteenth and last in the series. Kitty's ready to try to assassinate the master vampire Roman before he can carry out his plan to rule the world. Spoilers.

Or is that his plan? At the start of this book, it seems as though Team Good Guys is still rather in the dark. They know Roman is working for somebody, but they don't know for whom, or more than a vague hint at what the plan might be.

Turns out that he's working for the Devil. Or at least something very like him. All right, we already knew this world had demons in it, but there are lots of ways to make that work without including by reference all of Christian theology. Bringing in the actual Devil (and there isn't even a hint of justification about "this might be the original of the being that ancient peoples invented the stories about", though I think that's what the reader is meant to assume), and indeed the angels who show up mostly to be enigmatically annoying, is another matter, and for me it was a step too far. The concerning implications of Kitty's Big Trouble (that there really are things in the world which ought to be called gods) were largely forgotten between then and now, but this brings back all the problems, and largely fails to resolve them.

It also brings back minor characters from previous books, and it's good to see them again; what's more they actually have jobs to do that are specifically relevant to this story, rather than just being trotted on to do a standard routine and remind the reader who they were (an occasional flaw in the …in Death series).

All the same, for a story about the possible end of the world it seems strangely small; and, in the end, it's won not by Kitty doing anything uniquely Kitty but by working out how to use a plot token and then getting it to the right place at the right time. I'd have liked it much better if she'd ended up staying true to herself and talking the bad guys out of their plan.

There's not much closure for anyone except Kitty, though.

There are some other books about minor characters, which don't particularly interest me; a final short story collection is expected some time this year, and that does, because I've enjoyed Vaughn's short fiction rather more than the novels.