Great Fantasy Book – Deadtown by Nancy Holzner

Boston is a melting pot of supernatural creatures. Vampires, werewolves, shifters and zombies all co-exist within the city walls – that is, in one small section cordoned off from the humans. This quarantined zone is called Deadtown.

That’s where our heroine, Vicky Vaughn lives. She slays demons for a living, in particular, ones that infiltrate people’s dreams. Vicky enters the person’s dreamscape, kills the demon(s) there, and leaves the client with a promise of happy shiny dreams for the rest of his/her life.

After finishing one such job and packing up her things Vicky detects a slight presence of evil nearby. Apprehensive about dealing with another supernatural entity, Vicky blames her uneasiness on a lack of sleep and quickly corrals her teenage zombie assistant (who’d unexpectedly crashed Vicky’s demon slaying party) and heads home.

But Vicky can’t run from this particular evil. The next day she’s escorted to the police station and informed that her client died after her departure – but not of natural causes:

“He was . . .cooked. From the inside out. The body looked perfectly normal, even felt cold to the touch like you’d expect in a corpse. But when the paramedics lifted the victim onto the gurney, his mouth fell open. A jet of steam shot out and scalded one of the EMTs.”

“Ice cold skin but boiling inside.”

And just like that, Vicky’s world comes crashing in. You see, the detective has just described a Hellion, a badass demon of the worst caliper. Hellions exist to destroy on a large scale; earthquakes, plagues, and events of mass destruction are their specialties. Since Hellions almost never go after individuals it’s clear that a sorcerer (and a powerful one at that) must have directed the Hellion to attack her client.

Additionally, in order to get the Hellion inside Boston the sorcerer had to breach the city’s magical protective shield, previously erected by Boston’s white witches. But there’s a catch 22 to repairing the shield outright – sealing the shield means the Hellion is trapped inside the city and can’t be banished back to Hell.

But when the Hellion appears at the scene of Vicky’s next job and delivers a personal threat she realizes that her options for solving this problem are limited; she’s got to quickly hunt down and kill the Hellion (and find a way to banish it) before it starts a killing spree.

To complicate matters, her love life is on the skids, her closest family member is having identity issues and politics surrounding the upcoming gubernatorial race has prompted the press to shine a spotlight on her once private lifestyle.

Deadtown is the first in what I hope will be a long running fantasy series about Vicky’s life as a PA (Paranormal Americans) in modern day Boston. Nancy Holzner has created a plausible world in which humans and the supernatural co-exist, in particular, the political backdrop surrounding the story is dead on. Think about it: if we discovered that supernatural races had been living among us for centuries, the politics surrounding their legal and civil rights would dominate the airwaves. And can’t you just see our public servants making this issue a big part of their political platforms? All of this adds to the believability of Holzner’s storyline.

I thoroughly enjoyed Deadtown and eagerly look forward to the next installment in the series.