The Iron Hunt

  From Marjorie M. Liu's website:

"Silver smoke winds around my torso, peeling away from my ribs and back, stealing the dark mist covering my hands and lower extremities…tattoos dissolving into demon flesh, coalescing into small dark bodies. My boys. The only friends I have in this world. Demons.

I am a demon hunter. I am a demon. I am Hunter Kiss.

By day, her tattoos are her armor. By night, they unwind from her body to take on forms of their own. Demons of the flesh, turned into flesh. This is the only family demon hunter Maxine Kiss has ever known. The only way to live—and the very way she’ll die. For one day, her demons will abandon her for her daughter to assure their own survival—leaving Maxine helpless against her enemies

But such is the way of Earth’s last protector—the only one standing between humanity and the demons breaking out from behind the prison veils. It is a life lacking in love, reveling in death, until one moment—and one man—changes everything…"

The Iron Hunt is a continuation of the story begun in the novella HUNTER KISS, found in the short story anthology Wild Thing. You will need to read Hunter Kiss first in order to fully understand the events that take place in The Iron Hunt, but it's well worth it. Hunter Kiss is beautifully written and has one of my favorite opening lines of all time. In addition, the anthology contains a handful of other good stories worth reading (Maggie Shayne, Meljean Brook, Alyssa Day).

Having fallen in love with Maxine and her love interest, Grant, in Hunter Kiss, I'd been waiting a long time to read The Iron Hunt. Expectations were high. Pedestals were built.

The book is excellent.

Maxine has a rich and mysterious legacy, one that Marjorie reveals to us in a slow, sensuous striptease of a story. By the end of the book, many questions have been answered, but many more have been raised. I was definitely left hungering for more, but the story is dense enough that I feel like I've got something to hold me over. Scenes, lines of dialogue, characters keep flaring back to life in my mind, keeping me sated (at least for a while longer!). The prose is just as beautifully written as fans of her paranormal romances are used to but this story has an edge to it that her romances don't -- a dark, lonely core that I loved. It's not all serious, though. The boys--the demons who guard Maxine as armor-like tattoos during the day and as in-the-flesh bodyguards at night--are a riot.

Highly recommended!