ROGUE DEMON

A demon agent goes undercover to infiltrate a rival gang in Fey’s urban fantasy novel, the first in a series.

Enzo is a Fel: a fallen angel, a demon locked in perpetual warfare with the servants of God. In practice, he spends his nights riding his BMX bike around Atro City as a food deliveryman, partying with witches and trolls, and using his magic to find pleasure wherever he can with little regard for who gets hurt along the way. Enzo can’t kill humans directly—to do so would be to risk his own immortality—but he’s not above bringing about their deaths through other means. Generally, he and the other demons try to keep low profiles: “While exposure couldn’t be prevented in all cases, it was better if credible rumors about paranormal encounters never got started to begin with. Ignorance kept the humans docile and compliant.” One night, after unintentionally rescuing (and then intentionally bedding) Nadine, the queen of the local werewolf pack, Enzo is summoned to the offices of his boss, Dreadlord Mulct, and given a special mission: Nadine’s partner, the pack alpha Lorcan, has gone missing. Presumably, he’s either dead or being held hostage by the Unfallen, a rival (and allegedly “good”) sect of demons. On the orders of Lucifer himself, Enzo must infiltrate the Unfallen and free the captured werewolf. As Enzo goes about convincing the Unfallen that he’s one of them, he makes progress with a delivery customer, one that he’s been slowly seducing for the past year—a vegan enchilada-lover named Hailey. The deeper Enzo gets into his mission, the more he starts to understand the reputation the Fel have among their enemies. For the first time in his life, Enzo is forced to question his own allegiances.

Enzo’s world is full of all manner of ghouls and monsters, which the author humorously renders in her sharply observed prose. Enzo returns to his apartment to find that the wyrm he’s keeping there hasn’t eaten the food he left out for it: “Humphrey was tucked around a chair leg, quivering with guilt, but then it shamelessly proceeded to swallow the remains of a plastic bottle it had been chewing on during Enzo’s absence….The cold cuts he had left were still on the paper plate and hadn’t been touched. ‘You’ll eat plastic, but not meat?’ ” The world is richly drawn, and the narrative doesn’t take itself as seriously as many other novels in the angels-and-demons fantasy space do. The romance content is tamer than the cover suggests, though the profanity is abundant and the story can get quite violent at times. The characters are fairly stock, and Enzo’s cool-guy schtick is a bit humdrum in a city populated by so many varieties of night children. Even so, fans of the Halloween aesthetic will enjoy this tale enough to come back for future volumes.

An entertaining dark fantasy set in a city’s demonic underworld.