Class-Action Vampires

This end to the trilogy ups the stakes and fulfills the Chekov's gun of the last two books: the apocalypse. Where Daisy Johannsen was once merely acting as the supernatural equivalent of a small-town sheriff, the novel builds up the Agent of Hel until everything she loves is threatened. A minor plot involving a night hag exists mostly as a backdrop to Daisy's love life and legal problems left over from the previous two books. This keeps in with a theme of Daisy feeling powerless, which is what drives her to contemplate doing what would be unthinkable two books ago: invoking her birthright and threatening the destruction of the world. To get her there, Carey methodically endangers the people of Daisy's beloved town and takes away all normal recourses (legal, illegal, magical, technological) until the threat of a supernatural war looms... and is fulfilled.

I enjoyed this book quite a lot. The pacing, the world-building and the characterization gave me no problems. As others have mentioned, the series is not as lyrically beautiful in its descriptions as the Kushiel series, but Carey's voice switches quite well to a modern, youthful protagonist with pop culture references that evoke the Buffys of the genre without being an outright imitation of them. (I imagine it is also quicker and easier to write after who-knows-how-many words without modernisms! Carey deserves a break, neh?) I will end by saying the author gets bonus points for including a class-action lawsuit, since more of those really ought to happen in modern urban fantasies. 4 of 5.