The Iron Hunt by Marjorie M. Liu

Maxine Kiss is a modern-day Demon Hunter. Unlike others who may aspire to the job, Maxine has something special, something that can only be passed down from mother to daughter. For with her job comes five demons bonded only to her, who must live on her skin as tattoos by day, and who pull themselves free at night to help Maxine fight the demons who inhabit the bodies and souls of other humans.

Her mother traveled around the country, but Maxine has settled in a city, with her lover, the ex-priest Grant Cooperson, who tangled with a demon named Blood Mama and was rescued from her realm by Maxine. This left him with a few powers of his own, including the power his voice has over demons. And if he plays a flute, he can see the auras of other people and read them. His powers are considerable, and he has several demons who live at the homeless shelter he runs, convinced by him that they no longer need to hurt and kill others to survive.

Maxine lives at the shelter with him, but when she hears of the death of a private eye not far from the shelter who died with her name on a slip of paper in his jacket pocket, she is motivated to go looking for answers. But finding who sent the private eye looking for her is next to impossible, as Blood Mama has her own reasons vested in keeping the secret, and Zee, the only one of her demonic tattoo "boys" able to communicate in speech, has his own promises to keep, and these promises revolve around keeping the secrets Maxine's own mother and grandmother swore him to keep.

Worse for her, the Prison, that secret place of air built to imprison the demons long ago by the people called "The Builders", is failing, and Blood Mama and her zombies are the least inimical of the demons imprisoned within. Maxine may be fated to be the last of her kind, fated to die as the demons are released. And when they are released, the entire world will die. All life will feed the demon's hunger, and the world will go cold and dead.

But Maxine might also save the world, and a dancing demon named Oturu and his boss, Hunter think that Maxine is the one fated to do it. This is only strengthened when Maxine falls into a place called "The Wasteland" and manages to find her own way free, returning with a sword that even the builders fear. For the builders are on earth, ensconced in human bodies, but unlike demons, if their bodies are killed, they are simply reborn in a new one somewhere. Also unlike demons, who move on to adult hosts, the builders take over their hosts in the womb, melding with the personality of the human they occupy.

Now, with the sword, her mother's knives, her "boys" and a labyrinth of memories left to her by her mother, Maxine must save the world for humans or die trying, for if she can't do it, there is no one else who can.

This story reads like the second in a series, mainly because it began from a short story in an anthology. One I have not read. It's unfair to readers who haven't already read the original short story because it leaves you going, "Huh?" a lot of the time. Especially with the background of Maxine's lover, Grant, who doesn't make enough appearances in the story to justify her feelings for him. I mean, sure, he seems like a nice enough guy, but...

I found that a bit annoying. It's also annoying that everyone but Maxine in the story seems to know more about what is going on than she does. Okay, hyperbole... everyone other than the pure (more or less) humans. It's so bad that even Maxine gets pissed off about it, and as a reader, I was, too. It doesn't help that flashbacks are liberally interspersed through the first part of the story. That, somehow, just makes the confusion over what is really happening worse.

Things do start to clear up by about the middle of the story, so it's not completely dismal, but it is almost guaranteed to make the story amazingly hard to get into. It's as if the first half of the book is a veritable slog to get through, and after that, it gets only slightly better. This isn't the best Marjorie M. Liu book out there, and it isn't fair to make you buy the anthology the first story is in to be able to understand what the hell is going on. For those who stumbled on this book, a recap would have been nice so that you don't feel like you've been dumped in over your head right away.

I won't be recommending this to anyone. It's too hard to read and understand without reading the first short story in the Anthology book (or so I am given to understand, since I haven't even *seen* the anthology book yet). And to add insult to injury, the name of the Anthology isn't even given on a "previous works by..." or "other books by..." page in the beginning! As it is, most readers won't realize that they even can go out and read a previous story in this series! Good idea, extremely flawed execution. Hey. publishers! If you aren't going to make the writer give us a recap of the story in the anthology, at least let us know it exists!