georgiewhoissarahdrew 's review for:

Caballeros Desalmados by Ginn Hale

5.0

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"Chapter 1
The night hung in tatters. Gas streetlamps chewed at the darkness... Heavy purple clouds pumped up from smoke stacks and patterned the sky like ugly patches on a black velvet curtain. A few fireflies blinked from what corners of blackness remained.
A pair of them invaded the darkness of my rooms. I watched them flicker, darting through their insectile courtship. They swooped past my face, circled, and then alighted inside the fold of my shirtsleeve.
They crept close to one another, brilliant desire flashing through their tiny bodies. Their antennae touched and quivered. The female firefly reached out and stroked the male. He rushed into her embrace. Holding him close, she crushed her powerful mandibles through his head. Their flickering bodies blinked in perfect unison as she devoured him.
Some romances end more badly than others."

Many of the books I've read recently are unmemorable. Not necessarily badly written, but little more than functionally written.

And then there's the first page of "Wicked Gentlemen".

It's a bravura performance: terrific writing of such richness that it's nearly cloying. Except it's offset by the gritty characterisation (despised "lower-race" outcast abandons himself to the drug addiction he was forced into during months of torture), the mystery plot and a tentative unexpected romance.

The book's loosely set in a very AU England, where, many generations ago, "the Covenant of Redemption had brought my fallen ancestors up from Damnation. They abandoned their great kingdom of endless darkness in exchange for the promise of Salvation for themselves and their descendants. [But now] the carved temples and catacombs that had once been a city of hope had decayed into dank ghetto;...vast caverns gaped wide with tenement houses and ore sluices. The children of hell’s greatest lords had been bred down into coal miners."

Now, their descendants - demon-spawn like Belimai Sykes - are subject to the whims of Inquisitors such as William Harper.
"Death came by slow degrees on the hard metal tables of the Confessional rooms. It was done with simple questions and endless patience. Unlike the depictions in protest flyers, the Houses of Inquisition did not flow with rivers of blood. The walls were not stained with gore or hung with rusted hooks. The Houses were holy places. They were quiet, clean, and bright. Even the Confessional rooms were subdued and calm. The Inquisitors and Confessors never taunted or screamed threats. They asked politely for everything. The silver knives, nails, and prayer engines were merely devices with which they sought absolute truth. All they demanded was complete honesty."

The plot is relatively straightforward (Belimai & Harper get to the bottom of two successive demon vs human mysteries) and enjoyable (particularly the set-piece climax to the second half). Belimai's jaundiced view and sardonic observations lighten the tone too.
"Most of the Bankers I had seen were soft pillows of men. They traveled in chubby little clusters like summer clouds drifting across the sky."
But it's Belimai's tortured soul making a slow understated connection with Harper's upright Inquisitor that provides the emotional heft of the book.
"I stared at him, trying to think of what I would do if I chose not to join him. I wasn’t such a delicate creature that I would simply wither and die of sorrow. I could survive losing him; I just wouldn’t want to."

Make sure to follow up on the free epilogues on Ginn Hale's site, too.

Superb world-building, great writing and strong characters: thoroughly recommended.