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OSI #4
Infernal Affairs
A dead body on the beach turns out to be a live demon on the run from some of the nastiest bounty hunters in this dimension-or the next. Protecting one demon from another, Tess gets wrapped up in a case that's as dangerous as it is mind-boggling, especially when it begins to involve her own past.
304 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published April 19, 2011
5 people are currently reading
304 people want to read
About the author
Jes Battis
18 books175 followersJes Battis (they/them) is the author of THE WINTER KNIGHT (April 2023), the OCCULT SPECIAL INVESTIGATOR series, and the PARALLEL PARKS series. Jes writes in the areas of urban fantasy, horror, and mystery/thriller. They also teach literature and creative writing in the Canadian prairies.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
July 12, 2011
This is my first book in this series. I’ve learned to shy away from starting an Urban Fantasy in the middle of the series, but the first book in this series has been on my Wishlist for a while so I couldn’t resist giving this one a try. Unsurprisingly I found myself a little confused in the first couple of chapters. Tess has a lot of people in her group of friends, so I kept confusing the names. I also found myself bewildered by the character relationships. There were a lot of people living together and until I found out one of them was gay, I was confused over who was actually her love interest—the guy playing daddy or the one who she didn’t want to tell her boss was at her house. But after the first few chapters it all became clear.
I was impressed with the way Tess was written. She wasn’t bitchy or bitter or hardheaded, which I run into too often in UF. She didn’t pretend she had all the answers and was willing to let her insecurities show in her relationship. She was also part of a family and it showed. Her interactions with the other characters spoke of familiarity and comfort. It was a nice change from the usual loner heroines. Although I liked seeing family and friends all crammed together in one house, I didn’t really enjoy the parts where Tess played mom. I liked the teenagers on their own, but for some reason I didn’t like having to watch the parent/teen dynamic. I was also doubly impressed when I found out that the author was male. I think he captured a female voice very nicely.
A lot happens in this book and I think if you are a long time reader of the series you’ll be thrilled with the new information that’s revealed. Tess learns more about the demon half of her family and she finds reason to wonder if what she’s been told about her father all her life is really true. She also finally gets her necromancer boyfriend, Lucien, to open up a bit about his past. Unfortunately for her she doesn’t like everything she learns and has to adjust to the new insecurity she feels. There’s also a surprise event at the end that has me curious about where the series is going.
One thing that really surprised me about this book was the lack of climax. It was extremely odd to find that missing. The bad guy was defeated in a fight, sure, but it didn’t have the buildup and release of tension I usually associate with the climax of the story. I was surprised to find that without a clear cut high point I was left feeling a little adrift when the book ended. It wasn’t a huge problem for me, but it was something that bothered me.
The humor in this is pretty great. The characters are all friends together so they joke and laugh easily. I thought the jokes and one liners were funny, but I have to admit that after a while I got tired of it. When almost every character in the book is cracking jokes it wears on you a lot faster than if just the main character was doing it. The humor wasn’t just found in the jokes, though. The situations the characters found themselves in—like a patient waking up right as it’s about to be autopsied (this reminded me of a House episode)—provided a lot of the humor, too. It was also cute and funny to watch the little demon they found, Ru, try to adjust the world.
Overall I ended up enjoying this book a lot. The world and the magic were interesting, and I liked what I saw of their investigation agency. The friendships and the relationships were the strongest point of the book and seeing all the characters has made me want to read the older books to learn more about what got them to this point in life. I think I’ll be on the lookout for more OSI books in the future.
P.S. I don’t know why this was the line of disbelief for me, but when we got to law system and I learned that most of the lawyers were animals, I just couldn’t believe it. I can accept necromancers and demons and magic, but I can’t accept lawyer animals? Lol. I amuse myself.
Favorite Quote:
Review originally posted on Fiction Vixen.
I was impressed with the way Tess was written. She wasn’t bitchy or bitter or hardheaded, which I run into too often in UF. She didn’t pretend she had all the answers and was willing to let her insecurities show in her relationship. She was also part of a family and it showed. Her interactions with the other characters spoke of familiarity and comfort. It was a nice change from the usual loner heroines. Although I liked seeing family and friends all crammed together in one house, I didn’t really enjoy the parts where Tess played mom. I liked the teenagers on their own, but for some reason I didn’t like having to watch the parent/teen dynamic. I was also doubly impressed when I found out that the author was male. I think he captured a female voice very nicely.
A lot happens in this book and I think if you are a long time reader of the series you’ll be thrilled with the new information that’s revealed. Tess learns more about the demon half of her family and she finds reason to wonder if what she’s been told about her father all her life is really true. She also finally gets her necromancer boyfriend, Lucien, to open up a bit about his past. Unfortunately for her she doesn’t like everything she learns and has to adjust to the new insecurity she feels. There’s also a surprise event at the end that has me curious about where the series is going.
One thing that really surprised me about this book was the lack of climax. It was extremely odd to find that missing. The bad guy was defeated in a fight, sure, but it didn’t have the buildup and release of tension I usually associate with the climax of the story. I was surprised to find that without a clear cut high point I was left feeling a little adrift when the book ended. It wasn’t a huge problem for me, but it was something that bothered me.
The humor in this is pretty great. The characters are all friends together so they joke and laugh easily. I thought the jokes and one liners were funny, but I have to admit that after a while I got tired of it. When almost every character in the book is cracking jokes it wears on you a lot faster than if just the main character was doing it. The humor wasn’t just found in the jokes, though. The situations the characters found themselves in—like a patient waking up right as it’s about to be autopsied (this reminded me of a House episode)—provided a lot of the humor, too. It was also cute and funny to watch the little demon they found, Ru, try to adjust the world.
Overall I ended up enjoying this book a lot. The world and the magic were interesting, and I liked what I saw of their investigation agency. The friendships and the relationships were the strongest point of the book and seeing all the characters has made me want to read the older books to learn more about what got them to this point in life. I think I’ll be on the lookout for more OSI books in the future.
P.S. I don’t know why this was the line of disbelief for me, but when we got to law system and I learned that most of the lawyers were animals, I just couldn’t believe it. I can accept necromancers and demons and magic, but I can’t accept lawyer animals? Lol. I amuse myself.
Favorite Quote:
"Has this always been here?" I asked.
"It's new."
"But--just to be clear--we have a high-security hotel suite in the lab. With cable."
"You can't use it."
"But I hate sleeping on the couch in the break room."
"You don't have to. You can sleep at home, like other people."
"Is that bed a queen?"
"You're never using this room. Understand?"
I sighed. "It's not like we have paradimensional demons staying with us all the time. What about when it's not in use? Am I just supposed to ignore it?"
“Yes. You need my key card to get in, so it doesn't matter."
"Where was this room when we needed somewhere for Mia to stay?"
"It hadn't been built yet."
"Is there a bathroom over--"
"Forget it."
"Fine."
Review originally posted on Fiction Vixen.
August 17, 2012
I’m not usually a big fan of the Police Procedural, in Thrillers or in Urban Fantasy, which is why this review should be high praise. One of the reasons I read fantasy is, I know the odds of a Werewolf jumping out at me in the parking garage or a Vampire grabbing me for a snack are slim. I won’t read books about serial killers or rapists because it is too real, and I don’t find anything like that entertaining. In fact, I don’t understand people who do.
By the very nature of the job, the characters in Police Procedurals tend to be, like many of their real life counterparts, depressed, and bitter. I like my fantasy more upbeat then this variation of the genre usually dictates. I’m reading to forget the news, not to give me reasons to sit home alone with every light in the house on, fixating on man’s inhumanity to man and wondering what that noise I heard was. I don’t mind being scared; I just prefer it to be something that can’t scare me in real life.
There are exceptions to everything of course. Authors who write with a certain twist that grabs me despite the formula these types of books usually follow. Off the top of my head I can tell you I do like Diana Rowland’s Urban Fantasy Police Procedurals, and I like Jes Battis who writes the OSI Novels. OSI stands for Occult Special Investigations, and they are the CSI of the Paranormal in Vancouver.
Battis has a new OSI novel out today - May 31st: INFERNAL AFFAIRS, published by ACE. The publisher promo paragraph says:
A dead body on the beach turns out to be a live demon on the run from some of the nastiest bounty hunters in this dimension-or the next. Protecting one demon from another, Tess gets wrapped up in a case that's as dangerous as it is mind-boggling, especially when it begins to involve her own past.
Tess is the equivalent of a CSI investigator. If the Vancouver Police Department gets something that looks paranormal, her department is called in. They have the mix of science and magic to get the job done, and the weird shit always lands on their desks. Tess, like most of these characters, is suffering from job burnout.
She lives in a large apartment with her best friend and co-worker Derrick, who is gay and in a relationship with Miles who moved in, who is deaf, and who works with the lab. Much of the conversation in the house is in Sign language, which is cool and is convenient when they want to say something to each other without being overheard.
Tess and Derrick are co-parenting two teenagers they have adopted, Patrick and Mia both of whom are Vampires, one fully and one latent. Mia is able to take medication to suppress it, like a virus, and much of the book has Tess worrying that Mia will decide to become a Vampire. Tess says she doesn't think she has become a supernatural soccer mom, but she spends a lot of time worrying about the kids, which is what any mother does, and she keeps picking up strays, so I'm thinking that is exactly what she is, minus the soccer.
Tess’s boyfriend is Lucien, a consultant for OSI and a necromancer, and he has moved in as well. You’d think it would get to be a bit much, all these people working together and living together, but it seems to work. There is the occasional roommate spat but they have more on their hands to worry about then whose turn it is to make coffee, although they do argue about it. In addition to being a forensic scientist, Tess has an affinity for Earth magic. Everybody has something they are good at on the team and they all work together great.
Half the team is in relationships with each other, which means when they are called in, they’re all usually at the same place, Tess’s pad, which while potentially awkward at work, does save gas on the commuting.
Selena is the long-suffering boss, the cool boss you all wish you had. She also pretends to look the other way, at the coupling going on in the office. Let’s face it, if you work in police forensics, on the night shift, and the jobs are all paranormal….you’re going to have a tough time finding someone who “gets” what you are going through. Throw in magical abilities and…you must shop at work for a significant other.
Selena has paged everyone on the team to show up at 2:00 AM because a body has been found on the beach. Selena suspects that it is A. a demon and B. not dead, so everyone has to pretend to work at the morgue, get to the autopsy room, stop the autopsy, and cover up anyone’s memories of seeing them on the way out, which is just another night at work.
The team assembles, changes into appropriate undercover clothes, gets past the guards and into the room just in time to stop the Pathologist Dr. Rashid from cutting open the corpse. Turns out, Selena was spot on, it is a Demon, it isn’t dead, and surprisingly it is a child, albeit a 200-year-old one (on his planet they mature slowly.)
Just as they are calming the Dr. down after he starts to cut into the body of the boy and the kid rises up screaming, a very bad dude from another dimension appears. He has followed the other one over and is trying to return him, dead or alive.
A lot of shit talking starts up, then a serious battle breaks out in the Morgue and somehow they subdue the big baddie and transport both the demons to their lab, after having to do some extensive brainwashing behind them. They then begin to interview both of the demons to try to find out, what is really going on. The young one is named Ru, and he is pretty darn adorable, but he has amnesia so he isn’t very helpful as to why he is on earth or how he got there. The other one is seriously bad news and not helpful except to say he was hired to bring Ru back, that he is a terrorist on their planet, oh yeah and stuff like, “let me go or I will liquefy your brains.” He has to be kept doped up just to keep him from escaping, which of course he later does. This also kicks off an interesting subplot regarding Tess’s origins as the doped up evil Demon spouts some surprising things about Tess.
Everyone on the team takes turns babysitting Ru, teaching him about the important things on Earth, like TV and Microwaves. He's from a very advanced civilization and is damn smart, so it’s fun watching the interaction between him and the various team members.
I enjoyed Infernal Affairs a lot. It had just enough action to keep it from slowing down, but its real strengths are in the relationships between the co-workers, the friends, the lovers, and the adopted young vampires. Infernal Affairs doesn’t have to hit you over the head every five seconds with dramatic violent action. With Science, Magic, police calls, lovers spats, intergenerational parental spats and mysteries, and sparkling dialogue it keeps you turning the pages into the night.
Infernal Affairs has some of the best dialogue I’ve seen in Urban Fantasy. It is filled with snark, wit, emotion and charm. There is a lot of it. It was almost like reading a screenplay, with just a little description thrown in, which I enjoyed thoroughly. I adored the relationship between Tess and Derrick, it felt incredibly real and was very touching and was actually more nuanced then her relationship with Lucien, which maybe needs some kind of crisis to move it a long.
There were some serious revelations at the end of the book regarding Tess and the mystery of her Father. I also expect that Ru will be living at the pad by the next book, while they try to figure out how to enroll a 200-year-old baby demon into grade school or something. I suspect Tess and Derrick will have one more magical young misfit they have taken under their less than conventional wings to help raise. I hope so, it adds to the fun. What happens next with Ru, Tess’s new knowledge, and a decision made in haste leave me very eager to read what happens in the next installment.
PS:
One thing I don’t understand is why so many authors call characters in their books Demons, when they are just beings from a different dimensional plane of existence, or another planet and just like humans are both good and bad. Not exactly what I think of when I hear the word Demon, but I guess it sounds more exciting. I'm going to write a blog post about this at some point because it is interesting to me how the word Demon has been dechristianized in UF/PNR and either turned into something erotic or just co-opted to provide a new type of character.
By the very nature of the job, the characters in Police Procedurals tend to be, like many of their real life counterparts, depressed, and bitter. I like my fantasy more upbeat then this variation of the genre usually dictates. I’m reading to forget the news, not to give me reasons to sit home alone with every light in the house on, fixating on man’s inhumanity to man and wondering what that noise I heard was. I don’t mind being scared; I just prefer it to be something that can’t scare me in real life.
There are exceptions to everything of course. Authors who write with a certain twist that grabs me despite the formula these types of books usually follow. Off the top of my head I can tell you I do like Diana Rowland’s Urban Fantasy Police Procedurals, and I like Jes Battis who writes the OSI Novels. OSI stands for Occult Special Investigations, and they are the CSI of the Paranormal in Vancouver.
Battis has a new OSI novel out today - May 31st: INFERNAL AFFAIRS, published by ACE. The publisher promo paragraph says:
A dead body on the beach turns out to be a live demon on the run from some of the nastiest bounty hunters in this dimension-or the next. Protecting one demon from another, Tess gets wrapped up in a case that's as dangerous as it is mind-boggling, especially when it begins to involve her own past.
Tess is the equivalent of a CSI investigator. If the Vancouver Police Department gets something that looks paranormal, her department is called in. They have the mix of science and magic to get the job done, and the weird shit always lands on their desks. Tess, like most of these characters, is suffering from job burnout.
She lives in a large apartment with her best friend and co-worker Derrick, who is gay and in a relationship with Miles who moved in, who is deaf, and who works with the lab. Much of the conversation in the house is in Sign language, which is cool and is convenient when they want to say something to each other without being overheard.
Tess and Derrick are co-parenting two teenagers they have adopted, Patrick and Mia both of whom are Vampires, one fully and one latent. Mia is able to take medication to suppress it, like a virus, and much of the book has Tess worrying that Mia will decide to become a Vampire. Tess says she doesn't think she has become a supernatural soccer mom, but she spends a lot of time worrying about the kids, which is what any mother does, and she keeps picking up strays, so I'm thinking that is exactly what she is, minus the soccer.
Tess’s boyfriend is Lucien, a consultant for OSI and a necromancer, and he has moved in as well. You’d think it would get to be a bit much, all these people working together and living together, but it seems to work. There is the occasional roommate spat but they have more on their hands to worry about then whose turn it is to make coffee, although they do argue about it. In addition to being a forensic scientist, Tess has an affinity for Earth magic. Everybody has something they are good at on the team and they all work together great.
Half the team is in relationships with each other, which means when they are called in, they’re all usually at the same place, Tess’s pad, which while potentially awkward at work, does save gas on the commuting.
Selena is the long-suffering boss, the cool boss you all wish you had. She also pretends to look the other way, at the coupling going on in the office. Let’s face it, if you work in police forensics, on the night shift, and the jobs are all paranormal….you’re going to have a tough time finding someone who “gets” what you are going through. Throw in magical abilities and…you must shop at work for a significant other.
Selena has paged everyone on the team to show up at 2:00 AM because a body has been found on the beach. Selena suspects that it is A. a demon and B. not dead, so everyone has to pretend to work at the morgue, get to the autopsy room, stop the autopsy, and cover up anyone’s memories of seeing them on the way out, which is just another night at work.
The team assembles, changes into appropriate undercover clothes, gets past the guards and into the room just in time to stop the Pathologist Dr. Rashid from cutting open the corpse. Turns out, Selena was spot on, it is a Demon, it isn’t dead, and surprisingly it is a child, albeit a 200-year-old one (on his planet they mature slowly.)
Just as they are calming the Dr. down after he starts to cut into the body of the boy and the kid rises up screaming, a very bad dude from another dimension appears. He has followed the other one over and is trying to return him, dead or alive.
A lot of shit talking starts up, then a serious battle breaks out in the Morgue and somehow they subdue the big baddie and transport both the demons to their lab, after having to do some extensive brainwashing behind them. They then begin to interview both of the demons to try to find out, what is really going on. The young one is named Ru, and he is pretty darn adorable, but he has amnesia so he isn’t very helpful as to why he is on earth or how he got there. The other one is seriously bad news and not helpful except to say he was hired to bring Ru back, that he is a terrorist on their planet, oh yeah and stuff like, “let me go or I will liquefy your brains.” He has to be kept doped up just to keep him from escaping, which of course he later does. This also kicks off an interesting subplot regarding Tess’s origins as the doped up evil Demon spouts some surprising things about Tess.
Everyone on the team takes turns babysitting Ru, teaching him about the important things on Earth, like TV and Microwaves. He's from a very advanced civilization and is damn smart, so it’s fun watching the interaction between him and the various team members.
I enjoyed Infernal Affairs a lot. It had just enough action to keep it from slowing down, but its real strengths are in the relationships between the co-workers, the friends, the lovers, and the adopted young vampires. Infernal Affairs doesn’t have to hit you over the head every five seconds with dramatic violent action. With Science, Magic, police calls, lovers spats, intergenerational parental spats and mysteries, and sparkling dialogue it keeps you turning the pages into the night.
Infernal Affairs has some of the best dialogue I’ve seen in Urban Fantasy. It is filled with snark, wit, emotion and charm. There is a lot of it. It was almost like reading a screenplay, with just a little description thrown in, which I enjoyed thoroughly. I adored the relationship between Tess and Derrick, it felt incredibly real and was very touching and was actually more nuanced then her relationship with Lucien, which maybe needs some kind of crisis to move it a long.
There were some serious revelations at the end of the book regarding Tess and the mystery of her Father. I also expect that Ru will be living at the pad by the next book, while they try to figure out how to enroll a 200-year-old baby demon into grade school or something. I suspect Tess and Derrick will have one more magical young misfit they have taken under their less than conventional wings to help raise. I hope so, it adds to the fun. What happens next with Ru, Tess’s new knowledge, and a decision made in haste leave me very eager to read what happens in the next installment.
PS:
One thing I don’t understand is why so many authors call characters in their books Demons, when they are just beings from a different dimensional plane of existence, or another planet and just like humans are both good and bad. Not exactly what I think of when I hear the word Demon, but I guess it sounds more exciting. I'm going to write a blog post about this at some point because it is interesting to me how the word Demon has been dechristianized in UF/PNR and either turned into something erotic or just co-opted to provide a new type of character.
August 24, 2017
I missed the book before this but I love the series and this was a great book! I think Jess Batis has such a dynamic way of writing. She blends fantasy with science very well and builds the OSI world seamlessly. There are no other books on the cover listed after this one but I hope that's not true!!
February 3, 2019
I'm intrigued by this series and want to know more about the OSI, the family that Tess has built for herself and the link to her mysterious father. If you're a fan of other dimensions, supernatural happenings and a secret government agency that works to keep humans safe, you'll enjoy this story.
May 4, 2017
Incredibly sloppy and rushed ending. By far, the weakest of the series. I barely understand what happened at the end and the beginning of the final book is clear as mud.
June 13, 2011
***SPOILERS****
Okay, I can't wait to read the next book, because at the end of this book Tess quits! I am not sure if her leaving means that Derrick her partner and live in co/parent for Mia and Patrick will leave too.
So, the story begins were she's home cleaning the fridge and everyone gets a call from Selena the boss about a possible dead demon in the custody of the local CPD. So, Lucian, Miles, Derrick and Tess go to collect the body and just when the doctor was going to open up the chest of the boy who look like he could be no older than 10 years old but is around 200 yrs old and is the demon wakes up and another demon which is more powerful comes too to collect the boy demon. So they capture both demons after a struggle and it turns out that the boy demon isn't sure what happen or how he got to planet earth. So, the story is about going back to find out where he landed when he arrived, trying to interview the other demon as to why he wants the boy so badly and finding out that the tracker demon knows who Tess's father is and his name but won't say any more. Meanwhile, her mom comes over unexpectantly and teaches her how to duplicate her anthem in two and fight and hands her her mendor's anthem cause she feels now is the time. Also, Tess is a feeling alittle insecure about Lucian if they will stay together and for how long, could he be more attracted to males since he has slept with them in the past and he's only told her once that he loved her but she wasn't sure if she heard correctly since she has not heard it again. Finally she feels like she knows nothing about his past. But in the middle of the story he does open up a bit.
Back the case and Tess, she's been having dreams which she finds out were caused by her half demon sister because she wanted Tess to hate their father as much as she does. Right now Tess only hates him because she believe's that her mom was raped by her father but her half sister implies that she has not been told all of the truth. We find out what happened to bring the boy demon to this planet and he does seem to have remembered and I think in the end Tess might be also adopting him because when she quit she walks out the door with him. Through out the book Tess complains or repeatly says how tired she is so maybe that could be a reason why she quits but I wonder what she would do now. Maybe devote her time to finding out who her father is and meeting him.
So again I can't wait for the next book to come out!!
Okay, I can't wait to read the next book, because at the end of this book Tess quits! I am not sure if her leaving means that Derrick her partner and live in co/parent for Mia and Patrick will leave too.
So, the story begins were she's home cleaning the fridge and everyone gets a call from Selena the boss about a possible dead demon in the custody of the local CPD. So, Lucian, Miles, Derrick and Tess go to collect the body and just when the doctor was going to open up the chest of the boy who look like he could be no older than 10 years old but is around 200 yrs old and is the demon wakes up and another demon which is more powerful comes too to collect the boy demon. So they capture both demons after a struggle and it turns out that the boy demon isn't sure what happen or how he got to planet earth. So, the story is about going back to find out where he landed when he arrived, trying to interview the other demon as to why he wants the boy so badly and finding out that the tracker demon knows who Tess's father is and his name but won't say any more. Meanwhile, her mom comes over unexpectantly and teaches her how to duplicate her anthem in two and fight and hands her her mendor's anthem cause she feels now is the time. Also, Tess is a feeling alittle insecure about Lucian if they will stay together and for how long, could he be more attracted to males since he has slept with them in the past and he's only told her once that he loved her but she wasn't sure if she heard correctly since she has not heard it again. Finally she feels like she knows nothing about his past. But in the middle of the story he does open up a bit.
Back the case and Tess, she's been having dreams which she finds out were caused by her half demon sister because she wanted Tess to hate their father as much as she does. Right now Tess only hates him because she believe's that her mom was raped by her father but her half sister implies that she has not been told all of the truth. We find out what happened to bring the boy demon to this planet and he does seem to have remembered and I think in the end Tess might be also adopting him because when she quit she walks out the door with him. Through out the book Tess complains or repeatly says how tired she is so maybe that could be a reason why she quits but I wonder what she would do now. Maybe devote her time to finding out who her father is and meeting him.
So again I can't wait for the next book to come out!!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 4, 2017
Part of a series, this book is about Tess Corday, who works the night shift as an Occult Special Investigator in present-day Vancouver. She is den mother for an interesting group of individuals. Mia is a teen-age girl who, in a previous book, was bitten by a vampire, but hasn't "turned" due to daily injections. Patrick is a vampire with the ability to go out in the daytime. Miles and Derrick are gay lovers. In a previous book, Derrick was bitten by a paranormal creature, and fears that he is turning into "something different."
Today's assignment is to steal a body from the local morgue. It may look like a young boy, but it is actually a very elderly demon named Ru. They arrive just as Dr Rashid, the pathologist, starts his autopsy. He cuts into the body, and the child/demon sits up and starts screaming. At the moment, a large, angry centaur appears. It wants to bring Ru back to face "demon justice" (for lack of a better term).
In custody, the centaur threatens all sorts of grievous bodily harm, in very creative ways, for Tess and her group, and for Selena, her immediate boss. It also intimates that it knows the identity of Tess's father. Being half demon, Tess knows that her father was some sort of major-league demon who impregnated her mother. Tess does not even know his name. Do Tess and friends save Ru from the centaur? Does Tess get any answers concerning her father?
This is a first-rate piece of storytelling. It does not overdo the paranormal part, and it is extremely easy to read. Yes, it is worth the time.
Today's assignment is to steal a body from the local morgue. It may look like a young boy, but it is actually a very elderly demon named Ru. They arrive just as Dr Rashid, the pathologist, starts his autopsy. He cuts into the body, and the child/demon sits up and starts screaming. At the moment, a large, angry centaur appears. It wants to bring Ru back to face "demon justice" (for lack of a better term).
In custody, the centaur threatens all sorts of grievous bodily harm, in very creative ways, for Tess and her group, and for Selena, her immediate boss. It also intimates that it knows the identity of Tess's father. Being half demon, Tess knows that her father was some sort of major-league demon who impregnated her mother. Tess does not even know his name. Do Tess and friends save Ru from the centaur? Does Tess get any answers concerning her father?
This is a first-rate piece of storytelling. It does not overdo the paranormal part, and it is extremely easy to read. Yes, it is worth the time.
August 4, 2013
(3.5 stars) There didn't seem to be as much of a plot in this book. It starts off strong, but then meanders through all sorts of intense issues. It eventually comes full circle, but without a climax to the initial demon conflict. There is almost too much going on as the author is building towards the next book, making this almost a filler book. Like book 3 in the series, the "bad guy" is dispatched almost too conveniently at the end. The reveal about Tess's father at the end is through exposition rather than through real action/conflict, and her decision to make a big change at the end didn't have enough of an emotional buildup -- rather, we just see her under her every day stress without the deeper emotional angst that results in life-altering decisions. I still enjoyed the book because I've become invested in the characters through the previous books, but it could have been better.
September 13, 2011
3.5 stars. I have enjoyed all the books in this series (and again, they should be read in order.) This one was really good, up until the end and then it seemed to cut off short. I'm sure the next book will continue the saga, but in previous installments each book had a relatively complete story arc. This one felt incomplete. I also think Tess was a little dismissive of Derrick's fears and issues (okay, siding with the gay character here...) But seriously, what he described wasn't something you would just blow off in someone you cared about. Tess was a little too self-absorbed pay what felt like appropriate attention. So not the best of the series, but I care about these characters and will read the next one.
June 27, 2012
3.5 stars.
I have enjoyed all the books in this series, and even if I started in the middle (3rd) I would suggest they should be read in order. :)
This one was good as the other 3, at least up until the end when it seemed to cut off short. Or rather the end is anti-climatic and open (compared to previous book).
There's the usual fight with the teenagers son and daughter (which I admit is both good and bad. Good because it's so bloody realistic, bad because at times I found it annoying.)
On the overall story arch, more predominant here, we discover a few secrets on Tess' family that may impact on her life.
So, of course, I had to buy the 5th and last in the series .
I have enjoyed all the books in this series, and even if I started in the middle (3rd) I would suggest they should be read in order. :)
This one was good as the other 3, at least up until the end when it seemed to cut off short. Or rather the end is anti-climatic and open (compared to previous book).
There's the usual fight with the teenagers son and daughter (which I admit is both good and bad. Good because it's so bloody realistic, bad because at times I found it annoying.)
On the overall story arch, more predominant here, we discover a few secrets on Tess' family that may impact on her life.
So, of course, I had to buy the 5th and last in the series .
February 12, 2014
I read this series before joining Goodreads, and I really miss it, so I thought I would read Infernal Affairs and Bleeding Out again.
I should have started at book #1. I had forgotten how incredibly fascinating and snarky the OSI novels are. Battis created an urban fantasy with an extremely human not-quite-human heroine. Tess's extended family takes different to a whole new level, but the family problems are all too familiar. These bad guys would give anyone nightmares.
I should have started at book #1. I had forgotten how incredibly fascinating and snarky the OSI novels are. Battis created an urban fantasy with an extremely human not-quite-human heroine. Tess's extended family takes different to a whole new level, but the family problems are all too familiar. These bad guys would give anyone nightmares.
June 4, 2011
I wish I knew when the next book was coming out because the end of this one wasnt even close to an end! Obviously Im hooked though because I read it in a day and am eagerly awaiting the next one.
June 9, 2011
Another strong entry in this series.
July 20, 2011
Read from 6/21 - 6/22.
February 4, 2012
I enjoyed this book with all of its worldbuilding and advancing on the general plot, but it doesn't really feel like a novel so much as some stuff that goes into one or a series of them.
April 7, 2015
Kept feeling like I was missing something, through the entire book. Am glad I finished, was a good continuation of the series. A must read.
April 15, 2017
Another good read by Jes Batis. I am enjoying this series a lot.
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