Hungry Ghosts

January 2, 2017
Blackmoore’s third urban fantasy featuring Los Angeles-based necromancer Eric Carter (after Broken Souls) is freewheeling and laced with smart-alecky banter. As a consequence of his strategic marriage to Santa Muerte, Queen of Mictlan (the Aztec land of the dead), Carter is slowly petrifying into a jade statue, a fate shared by her other husband, Mictlantecuhtli. Carter knows that the only way to save his skin is to kill both of them. This leads to a concatenation of escapades that includes dalliances with the avatars of both the king and queen, a bargain with an incarnation of Quetzalcoatl, and a journey to Mictlan, where reanimated corpses and the titular ghosts run rampant. The novel’s plot is loose and dependent on info dumps of Aztec and Mayan folklore, but Blackmoore keeps the action brisk and the mood light, sprinkling his text with breezy witticisms (“Mages are just academics who found something practical to do with a philosophy degree”). Fans of the series will devour this installment in anticipation of Carter’s next adventure.

January 1, 2017

Necromancer Eric Carter is driving the roads of Mexico looking for the avatar of Santa Muerte, the former Aztec goddess of the dead worshipped throughout Latin America. He has vowed to kill her despite technically being married to her. She has manipulated Eric, leading him to her former power base in Mexico City and promising him that if he will slay her ex-husband, Mictlantecuhtli, he can save himself from the growing infection that is turning him to stone. And yet another Aztec god has made Eric promise to destroy both death gods and burn their palace to the ground. VERDICT While Blackmoore provides the backstory on Carter's path to his current predicament (as traced in Broken Souls), this is probably not the place for new readers to jump in. The learning curve is complicated by the high number of Nahuatlan (Aztec language) words and names embedded throughout the author's refreshingly different worldbuilding.--MM

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