The Iron Hunt by Marjorie M. Liu (2008)The Iron Hunt (2008) by Mar­jorie M. Liu is the first in a new series fea­tur­ing demon hunter, Max­ine Kiss. By day she has demonic spir­its liv­ing on her body, mak­ing her immor­tal by pro­vid­ing their bod­ies for her armor and at night, they awake and peel away from her skin to be her body­guards against her super­nat­ural enemies.

Max­ine Kiss is by nature, a loner. A woman with­out fam­ily or roots. A woman try­ing to out­run her future. How­ever, Max­ine does decide to set­tle down in Seat­tle, with an ex-priest and man of faith, Grant Cooperon. He’s a flute-player who can see people’s auras and has the abil­ity to change them into some­thing good. He runs a home­less shel­ter where demons have inhab­ited the bod­ies of many of the res­i­dents. He exper­i­ments with them, using his flute-playing to change their souls.

Mov­ing on. As the last line of women War­dens who were sent to pro­tect mankind from the demons who have escaped the prison veil, Max­ine is the last one of her kind. Her mother died when she was twenty-one. The story includes quite a few scat­tered scenes of Maxine’s mother and her life before she died. Max­ine is well aware of her des­tiny. She knows that one day, she must pass down “the boys” as she refers to them, to her future gen­er­a­tion one day. When that hap­pens, an order for her death will be ren­dered and like her mother before her, she will die by the hand of her enemies.

The story starts off with the mur­der of a pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor who was search­ing for some­one who wasn’t sup­posed to be pub­licly known to any­one. At least that is what Max­ine Kiss thought until she is ques­tioned by the cops about her con­nec­tion to the recently deceased pri­vate eye. She denies know­ing him and decides to do a lit­tle detect­ing of her own to find out why he was search­ing for her. She is even­tu­ally led to an elderly gen­tle­man, an anthro­pol­o­gist, who seems to have an inter­est in many dis­ci­plines and seems to have many secrets. The rest of the plot is some­what hard to sum­ma­rize but it involves real life folk­lore and myth, a bit of time-travel and the threat of the apoc­a­lypse at the hands of the supernatural.

I have absolute respect for an author who thinks out­side the box but there are crit­i­cisms worth not­ing and dis­cussing about The Iron Hunt. Let’s start with the nar­ra­tive voice: it just didn’t flow well for me. Too many abrupt sen­tences and comma splices. True, I had expe­ri­enced that writ­ing style in the anthol­ogy but it wasn’t as bad (I thought) as it was in here. Sec­ond prob­lem is the plot: too com­pli­cated, overblown, con­vo­luted, com­plex, repet­i­tive and ambigu­ous. Lastly, the char­ac­ters failed to live up to their stated poten­tials. Max­ine and her “boys” get shot at, ran over and sucker punched. For the armor that she has, it wasn’t very impres­sive. All the “boys” ever really did was eat inan­i­mate objects and sing along to rock tunes while they remained idle for most of the book.

The bad guys, while entrenched in a con­vo­luted plot that ran in cir­cles, they man­aged to eek out some scary moments. Espe­cially, Oturu, a demon made up of flesh and blood with feet made of knives who danced when he deliv­ered a killing blow. No doubt this author has a vivid imag­i­na­tion with an inter­est­ing premise but I think it was poorly exe­cuted. The Iron Hunt was a dis­ap­point­ing read. There were a hand­ful of scenes that were inter­est­ing but over­all the book tanked for me. There is much about this plot that I have not dis­cussed and will leave for you to dis­cover on your own if you choose to read this book.

Hon­estly, after read­ing the anthol­ogy (that I hope you have read), I got what I expected. I was just hop­ing that Ms. Liu would sur­prise me with her dif­fer­ent and unique story but she didn’t. As for the romance, I almost didn’t men­tion it because guess what? There really wasn’t much of one in here. Most of the roman­tic plot was wrapped up in the anthol­ogy so no sex, no romance, no chem­istry and I still don’t much like the hero. My grade for The Iron Hunt is a D. Read at your own risk.