Demon Hunts (Walker Papers 5) by C.E. Murphy

Description:
Seattle police detective Joanne Walker started the year mostly dead, and she's ending it trying not to be consumed by evil. Literally.

She's proven she can handle the gods and the walking dead. But a cannibalistic serial killer? That's more than even she bargained for. What's worse, the brutal demon can only be tracked one way. If Joanne is to stop its campaign of terror, she'll have to hunt it where it lives: the Lower World, a shamanistic plane of magic and spirits.

Trouble is, Joanne's skills are no match for the dangers she's about to face—and her on-the-job training could prove fatal to the people she's sworn to protect….

My Review:
After finishing Murphy’s last novel, Walking Dead, I swore to myself I wouldn’t bother reading her series until it was finished and I could read it through – book one to whatever. Well that didn’t quite work out. Due to my having a lot more free time than usual (read: unemployed) I decided to pick up the new Murphy novel and give it a go.

In this novel, Joanne is investigating a series of mysterious murders involving corpses that appear to have been eaten. We find that she has been working with her partner, Billie Holliday, on the down-low on the majority of these cases because they may have some mystical element to them. The regular police, Joanne and Billie, and anyone else in the know, haven’t been having much luck.

Joanne and Billie then begin wandering around trying to figure things out – and the story begins to follow some of the paths we have seen in previous Murphy novels. Joanne blindly wanders around the city trying to 'follow leads' and not really doing too much of the detecting she is supposed to have been trained to do.  She fumbles with a couple of attempts at attracting and trapping the killer, and of course makes a big mess of everything even managing to attract some unfortunate (but not unsurprising considering her history) media attention.

Then, rather out of the blue, Coytoe shows up in human form at one of Joanne's crime scenes.  This was the strangest part of the novel for me. Not only are we meeting the physical man Coyote, but Joanne is also suddenly falling into bed with bed with him (the person who was mentoring her about two books ago but we all thought was dead), who I didn’t remember having a romantic relationship with Joanne at all. In fact this entire area of Joanne ‘being with’ Coyote was very random and felt forced. As far as I could remember, he was more of a teacher figure for Joanne, not a romantic interest. Even going back to the previous books it wasn’t clear that he had any romantic interest in her at all. If anything it seemed as though he viewed her as an annoying kid sister more than as a romantic partner. In any case, because of this sudden reappearance of Coyote, and the earlier decision that Joanne would not follow her heart and be with Morrison, we have some strange romance going on in this novel.  While the serial killer may be the 'heart' of the story, it almost feels like the second fiddle to the romantic confusion going on.

Now what are we doing?  Oh right, we are trying to locate a mysterious killer. Joanne is trying to come to grips with her power (still and forever I think) and learn more about how to be a proper warrior. In the end we find the killer, a woman who had accidentally gone primal in order to survive when her soul was lost in a ‘snowstorm’, and we fix the problem. It also felt odd to me that a cannablistic killer is causing everyone so many problems when Joann has had to deal with big time gods before.  Murphy tries to justifiy this, but doesn't do a very good job.  Joanne doesn’t really grow that much as a character, and I still don’t really like the convoluted storyline, although this was better than the previous novel in terms of wandering around on astral fields.

While I like Murhpy’s wit and writing style, she had me laughing a few times, I still can’t find it in myself to love this series. It gets too abstract, too often, and mixes too many mythical concepts together. I’m sure Murphy has a concept of where she is going with all of this, and we even get hints of it in the novel, but I’m not sure I’m going to stick around for the ride.

Two and a half out of five.