Black Dog: Hellhound Chronicles
Caitlin Kittredge
Harper Voyager, Oct 28 2014, $14.99
ISBN 9780062316912
Ava the hellhound collects a debt owed by Bob Dobkins to her
employer Gary the reaper who sent the miscreant’s soul to Hell. Ava is lonely as she has been for the past
century in which Gary has owned her; as no one human or otherwise with an ounce
of sanity, wants coffee with a hellhound; except her vicious boss when he makes
demands of her that she knows she better fulfill.
Gary’s boss Lilith orders the Reaper to send his Hellhound to look
into the increase in deadhead activity in the Mohave near the locale of Alex
Ivanoff and kill the human for dabbling in necromancy though his debt is not
due. In Vegas, a deadhead juiced by a
necromancer attacks her; only he is not an Alex convert; he is Alex. Instead of killing Ava, Leonid Karpov the
necromancer kidnaps her. Leo explains
she is his third captured hellhound, but the first two died snarling at him;
that he still owns his soul; and that with her help he will kill Gary starting
with Ava stealing her reaper’s scythe.
The first Hellhound
Chronicles is an exciting urban fantasy starring a sympathetic repo hellhound
who muses on how far she has fallen since she fled as a teen Bear Hollow,
Tennessee for New Orleans during Prohibition.
However, the Cecile B. DeMille sized support cast and especially an
inordinate number of supernatural species are difficult to follow and keep
track of without a paranormal classification similar to the Linnaeus seven-category hierarchical biological system. Still subgenre fans will want to tour the USA with Ava as our snarling
badass guide.
Harriet Klausner
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