I love Tanya Huff’s humour. It’s energetic, confident, gentle, witty and almost always follows the path less travelled by.

In this light little book, she manages to summon up a whole new occult world, filled with new takes on all the things that haunt our dreams, position them over a not-quite-sealed hell mouth and populate it with a powerful, likable woman who is focused on saving the world (again) but is distracted by the nice and or charming men she finds herself cohabiting with.

I loved that our heroine, champion of humanity against the forces of darkness and wielder of arcane power, calls her mum to get advice on what to do next and is afraid of nothing except perhaps what her incredibly powerful little sister might do if left unsupervised.

Then there’s the cat who is… everything I always expected cats would be if they deigned to talk to us and if they accepted responsibility for a young Keeper with the power to fight Hell and win but with a limited ability to understand other people as anything other than Bystanders.

There’s humour that uses the energy the stereotypes for both Newfies and Canucks while managing to debunk them and take away their power to demean.

There’s also a fair amount of slapstick, pratfallish fun.

If you’re in the mood for a smile and some entertaining urban fantasy trope twisting, this book won’t let you down.