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Hell on High | Rating | |
| B | |||
| Holly Lisle and Ted Nolan | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| N/A | Sympathy For the Devil, The Devil and Dan Cooley, Hell on High | ||
When Lucifer discovers one of his Fallen has gone missing, he knows there is only one place for her to go: North Carolina. But Averial is doing an uncommonly good job of lying low. So it'll be up to the only demon private detective to track her down. If he succeeds, money and power will be his. If he fails, it'll be his hide - literally. Meanwhile, Jack Halloran is working on a prototype space drive for Celestial, Inc., based on the owner's own design. Physicists say her drive can't work, and so far he's proving them right. If he can't get it working, the company will go down in money-starved flames. Worse, he'll lose any chance of dating his CEO.
I appreciated the authors' depiction of life in North Carolina now that a full two years and more have passed since the Unchained appeared. People have gotten used to it. Not that having Hell's minion physically present isn't a problem and a peril, but life does go on. And, given the rules God had put the Unchained under, including that they cannot harm or pay to have harmed any human, then there's no reason not to learn how to live with it as just one more of life's little trials. Or big ones, maybe.
I also thought the detective demon, Glibspet, was a riot. This is one character who truly enjoys being bad. And he's darn good at it, too, in unique and amusing ways. The wole book is light and fun and easy to read, but his scenes are really the high points.
On the other hand, the back cover has absolutely nothing to do with the plot. The blurb is all about Devil's Point Amusement Park and what Hell is doing with it, and it strongly implies that it's about one person's tempting by all it has to offer. But the story is about Hell's attempts to track down Averial, her trying to avoid Hell's employees, and what she's doing while in hiding. The book does visit Devil's Point, but it is one scene. It's one of the longer scenes, but it is still just one among many.
I was also seriously upset at the ending. It's one thing to introduce demons and devils to real word life, but bringing space travel into the picture as well just goes too far. It breaks the classic "Tooth Fairy" rule, in which authors are granted one big assumption or outrageous occurrance, but trying for two strains credibility and plausibility. It just takes too much suspension of disbelief, especially with two so very different things. Even though this is the last book of the trilogy, even though the books are all light - hardly hard sci-fi or epic fantasy - it really hurts the book.
Still, until the very end, the problems are really pretty minor. The book is very enjoyable, all the moreso because it is not just another attempt to get someone to switch from good to evil, or vice versa. It's a very different plot from the first two, and it's a good one. It's still well worth taking a look at, especially if you enjoyed the first two books.
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