I have read three of his books: A Dirty Job, You Suck! and Practical Demonkeeping.
A Dirty Job
This was the first of the three I read, it is a charming tale about how a man deals with the death of his wife just after she gave birth to their daughter and then has to deal with possibly being the next incarnation of Death. The characters were nicely fleshed out, “Minty Fresh” was an absolute delight, but a couple of Hellhounds-cum-pets were the real stars for me. I thought it had a bit of an abrupt ending, the last few chapters felt very weak and compared to the rest of the book.
You Suck!
At first I thought it would be a typical vampire tale, but I was delighted when the main character, who had been “turned” just before the book started spent the first few chapters getting to grips with his new-found supernatural status. Far too much of this book were diary entries written in the tongue of a young, hip, Goth vampire wannabe: “and I was all like, totally, like, what the fuck”. Another weak ending marred what was (another) solid read for the first 80% of the book, with random people turning up to save the day and the aforementioned diary sections providing far too much of the climactic narrative, but this is a must-read if you ever wanted to know what kind of sex vampires have.
Practical Demonkeeping
Although this was an earlier publication, I read this after the other two. I was assured that all his books were stand-alone by a very helpful Waterstones chap, so I wasn’t worried about reading stuff out of order, or having too much prior knowledge about critical plot-points. I enjoyed this book a bit more than the other two, although it took longer to get going and felt very disjointed with far too many characters in the early stages. You cannot fault the author on his ancient history/myths and legends research though, it really shone in this tale. Catch, the devious demon referred to in the book’s title, was the star of the show.
Overall I thought they were quite entertaining (if a little too American), but I think Jane rates the guy higher than I do.
He has a website, here.
