Souljacker

Starred review from January 23, 2017
Galenorn (the Otherworld series) launches the Lily Bound paranormal romance series with a murder mystery that crackles and sizzles. In this parallel present, humans know about supernatural entities but don’t trust them or accept them in human society. Lily is a 600-year-old succubus, a member of the Fae Winter Court in Seattle. She satisfies her need to feed on chi energy by providing sexual services for money. She has a few close friends in the supernatural community but is rather solitary by nature. All of that changes when someone kills a client in Lily’s one-woman brothel and escapes without being seen. The dead man is a weretiger, and a leading figure in the were community. Suddenly Lily needs to defend herself against political repercussions. She’s also trying to keep her friends safe from a vampire predator known as the Souljacker. Help comes from an unlikely source: a chaos demon named Archer who manages to connect with a protected part of Lily’s soul. Ostensibly the story centers on the search for the killer, but it goes much deeper, laying the foundation for what promises to be an insightful exploration of Lily’s process of personal change while giving readers a peek at a political chess game. The characters leap to life, carrying readers along on a journey through a world much like this one but with a dangerous allure. Agent: Meredith Bernstein, Meredith Bernstein Literary Agency.

February 1, 2017
First in Galenorn's (Blood Music, 2016, etc.) new urban fantasy series, featuring a succubus who runs a sex salon where a psychotic vampire has taken his first victim.Lily O'Connell, a succubus, runs Lily Bound, a sex salon that caters to the dark fantasies of the fae, weres, and other paranormal creatures who populate Galenorn's alternate Seattle. Galenorn blends the commonplace with the fantastic to depict a city built on an uneasy cooperation among races, constantly threatened by those, like vampires, who refuse to play by the rules. Lily Bound allows Lily to slake her constant thirst for energy via sex without harming anyone. But when she finds a client murdered by a vampire, she reaches out for help, which arrives in the form of human, witch, and were friends. They quickly realize the killer is none other than the Souljacker, a dangerous prison escapee intent on killing them all. Since Seattle police will not handle vampire cases, Lily turns to PI Archer Desmond for assistance. Archer is a chaos demon who falls fast for Lily's glamouring charms. Although this is billed as a crossover urban fantasy/erotic paranormal romance, the sex scenes are perfunctory and few, and the romance between Archer and Lily is uninspired. Despite the intriguing premise of "an elite sex salon" and Lily's assertions to the effect that "I'm proud of what I do. I give pleasure in a world full of pain," she views her salon as an inferior alternative to the more traditional lifestyle she can never have. A well-plotted introduction to an interesting paranormal version of Seattle that only needs well-developed protagonists with rich interior lives to suck readers in.

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