Engaging Police Procedural mystery amplified by the involvement of the demon realms and a well thought through system of magic.

‘Blood Of The Demon’ is the second book in Diana Rowland’s series about Kara Gillian, a Police Detective in Beaulac, Louisiana who has a talent for summoning demons. The novels are a mix of police procedural and a magic system involving summoning demons, beings from a parallel plane of existence, spiced a little bit of sexual frisson.

I read the first book. ‘Mark of the Demon’ back in 2014 and, although I enjoyed it, it didn’t light me up the way the Angel Crawford books did and it’s taken me a while to get to the second book.

I thought this book was stronger than the first, mostly because there’s a fairly complicated and engaging murder mystery to solve. Most of the book is straight police procedural made more complex by the involvement of demons of various kinds who Kara Gillian can’t even tell anyone about.
The magic system is original and well thought through and there are hints that it will continue to evolve with the series.

The action scenes are very well done. The scene where Kara is in danger of drowning which was very vivid. The police procedural things are very down to earth and believable and the plot was complicated enough that it took quite a while to work out who had done what.

The only thing that didn’t work for me was the scene where Kara has sex with the Demon Lord. It was so badly written, it made me reach for the fast forward on my audiobook. The sex wasn’t gratuitous, it made sense both for the story and for the characters, but it read like amateur erotica. It was supposed to be a power exchange scene with the Demon Lord as the Dom and Kara as the willing Sub, except none of the participants, including the writer, seemed to have their hearts in it. If we’d had had the lead-up and the analysis afterwards with only a few words in between, not only would we not have mussed anything but I wouldn’t have felt as if I’d wandered into a different novel for a while.