Personal Demon.

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

Among a plethora of clichéd supernatural romances, Kelley Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld series stands out for its better than average style, wit, and ability to place its characters in a fairly realistic world. Beginning with Bitten, about a unique werewolf woman, it has branched out into stories of witches and their antagonists, sorcerers (who run huge corporations, called Cabals), as well as the various kinds of half-demons.

In Personal Demon, Hope Adams is a rather rare half-demon: she feeds of chaos, and can detect it. She works for the youngest, and rebel, son of the CEO of the largest Cabal, where she can guiltlessly feed her demon side as an investigative reporter. The novel shifts back and forth between her and his narratives, as his father hires her to investigate a gang that could prove troublesome to the Cabal.

Supernaturals both live in the world and hide their true nature from it, and the Cabal fears that the gang’s activities might expose them. But it turns out that two gang members are much more than they seem, with newly evolved supernatural powers, and Hope finds herself in a far more complicated and dangerous situation than anyone had expected. Not least because she’s on the rebound from what she thinks is a failed affair with a werewolf.

Armstrong has concocted a solid murder mystery as well as a complex story of two young people coming to terms with their inheritances. Personal Demon takes readers of the series deeper into the ongoing history and contemporary machinations of the complex society of her “otherworld,” but it stands nicely on its own as an entertaining romantic thriller.