I liked the first book a lot and I was really excited when I got my hands on this book. However, I was pretty disappointed due to the fact that the book is very heavy and tragic--Dante just can't get a break. I have no objections to sadness, but Dante spends most of the book grieving and having nightmares about her past. After a while it just got tiring. Also, I don't know what it is like to have a new body but the continual phrase, "smell of dying human cells" got annoying fairly quickly. As much as I like the idea of Dante Valentine, the general slowness of this book combined with reviews of the next three books have convinced me not to continue on with the series. Stick with book one. ( )

It's been a while since I read "Working for the Devil", but when I saw this book in a used book store, I grabbed it. I'm half glad that I did, as the central story was neat. Dante has to track down what's killing former students from Rigger Hall, the acadamy at which she spent years of hell, being abused and tortured when she couldn't escape the notice of the stooges and the headmaster. The old scars are well portrayed. The problems crept in when almost every chapter would redescribe her looks, her weapons, her friends, her loves. It was clunky and broke the flow, reading like something I would get chapter by chapter in a magazine rather than a novel. Then there was one former student that had information to share with Dante, and at first I was impressed that Saintcrow had included a transgendered character. The only thing she got right was the pronouns. She mixed up transvestites and transgendered people, she made the character a sex witch with no control over her sexuality, and Dante kept commenting on ways that Polyamour (*sigh*) didn't pass. ( )

Not quite as good as the first Dante Valentine, but still good. She spends an awful lot of the book hurting - both in pain and doing damage to herself and others. Not so much physical as mental and emotional. I _hope_ the events here help her clean out some of her clogged-up emotions - the question of Jace and Jaf is pretty much finished by the end of the book, anyway, and Rigger Hall should be more or less handled. She's also making interesting and influential friends. There are major changes in her life and in the people around her, mentioning any of which would be major spoilers, so I'll try not to. But she's seriously oblivious to some major hints - from the Devil, and from Jaf before. OK, I saw them - I'm not hurting and dealing with being in a new body and trying to deal with it by being to busy to think. But still - it got annoying after a while. And then she did the right thing entirely by accident - meaning to do something else. Anyway. Interesting world - oh, and thanks to the glossary in the back it is clearer that this is a possible future - the old 'Merican Republic' existed until the middle (end?) of the 21st century, then things changed. Huh - and the sedayeen sound awfully like the Lightbringers...now I have a different question about what universe this is. Fun. I _like_ Saintcrow's books. ( )

This is quite an uncomfortable book - deliberately so and really quite nicely done. We find out rather too much about Rigger Hall and its history, and as a consequence quite a lot more about why Dante is the way she is.

Something is killing psions who were at Rigger Hall, and the police are baffled. They call in Dante and Jace who eventually, and with some surprising bits along the way, Dante beats the bad guy down and gets some closure.

Also lingering through here is Dante's mourning for the death of Japh, which is very nicely handled.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like Dante to come for a weekend visit, but I find her a good, interesting hero for this series. She is flawed, but the flaws make sense and you see her work on them and her change over the course of the book and the series to date. ( )

Second in the Dante Valentine paranormal series. In this book, someone is killing psions…no, not just killing them, butchering them, flaying them, literally destroying them. Why? And why was the first victim a “normal” with no psionic ability? What is the connection between them all? Gabe, Dante’s policewoman friend, wants her to help look into it and find out. And will Dante ever get over her grief for the demon Japhrimel, her lover who had changed her irrevocably into something else—part-demon, yet still part-human Necromance, gifted to commune with the dead. I enjoy this series and I do like Dante, so this might sound weird, but I found this book to be very put-downable. The reason for that is, it was just TOO intense. There was no down-time in the book at all. Dante rolled from one crisis to another, spent many pages agonizing over Japhrimel’s demise and her role in that. It was just too much to read more than a few chapters at once without needing a break from the intensity. There was also a lot of repetitive descriptions of different smells, scents, etc. of not only places but people/psions, and that got to be kind of old after awhile. ( )