Review: Didn't work on any level
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 02 26, 2014
After the first book, I was a little skeptical about reading this one.  The previous effort was so bogged down in editorial and writing errors (e.g. Multiple characters' dialogue intermixed in the same text blocks) that it made concentrating on the story itself difficult.  When the sample showed that, for the most part, those errors were absent, I decided to give the author a second shot, and rather wished I hadn't.First, all the characters felt the same to me.  What i mean is that all of them were wildly hormonal teenagers in the bodies of grownups (for the most part), and all of them had some kind of bipolar disorder.  They would go from ecstatic to "readily sexually aroused" to crying and depressed in the course of a page or two (or from paragraph to paragraph).  There were some neat running gags that could have been used to help tease characters apart, but none of them (except MAYBE Penny) really had any personality.  DD, who was the principle character for this story, bounced from depressed to happy to aroused to shy to dominatrix like a kangaroo on crystal meth.  There was a long plot line involving the character of Katy which never made sense to me, even at the end.The plot itself was kind of a rambling mess.  There were a series of encounters that were tied together kind of roughly toward the end.  There was a swerve with one of the characters that felt like an attempt to have a "Keyser Soze" moment but just came across as desperate.  The ending of the book was a complete mess, with the author skipping forward past the final conflict and the telling some of what happened through character narrative.The author's attempts to weave a modern urban fantasy genre (which had potential) with Christian mythology was rather ham-handed.  If you read the previous work, you'll know that Grim had some literal "come to (the Christian version of) god" moments, and those keep happening.  The characters could be talking with a major biblical figure, have a roman orgy, and then kill / maim a bunch of people with a group prayer for dessert, all within a few chapters of each other.  I've seen other sources use the mythology of the major JCM religions before and sometimes it's pulled off fairly well, but here it was just used as a way to say that everybody can be forgiven for anything if, A) it was done in god's name or, B) you ask for forgiveness at some point.  The random discussions about faith spaced between scenes of violence and sex began to feel very repetitive as well.Overall, if you're more religiously inclined than I am, I can still see a reader getting some enjoyment out of this book (maybe up to 3 stars), but I have no idea how a 4 or 5 star review would be deemed appropriate.  I have a feeling that the author is a fairly creative person (probably would be fun to hang out with), and hopefully he will be able be able to more smoothly integrate these disparate mythologies a little more cleanly if he chooses to continue this story (or something similar).