Why You'll Love This
Felix Castor is broke, contractually haunted by a succubus, and somehow the only thing standing between London and something genuinely monstrous.
- Great if you want: noir-flavored urban fantasy with real stakes and dark wit
- The experience: gritty, steadily escalating tension — the plot tightens like a noose
- The writing: Carey's prose is sharp and wry, with a detective-fiction rhythm that feels earned
- Skip if: you haven't read book one — character threads won't land the same
About This Book
Felix Castor is back—reluctant, broke, and morally compromised in ways that feel uncomfortably real. The second installment in Mike Carey's urban fantasy series finds London's most reluctant exorcist taking on what should be a minor missing-ghost case, only to watch it unspool into something far darker and more personal. With a possessed best friend, a succubus who technically still wants him dead, and an overdraft that won't quit, Castor operates in a London where the undead are an everyday inconvenience and good intentions reliably make everything worse. The stakes are intimate before they become enormous, which makes them land harder.
What distinguishes Carey's writing here is the voice—world-weary without being smug, sharp without losing its humanity. Castor narrates like a man who's read too much noir and lived too much of it, and Carey sustains that tone across 500-plus pages without it ever curdling into self-parody. The plotting rewards attention; threads introduced early pay off in ways that feel earned rather than engineered. For readers who want their fantasy grounded in consequence and character rather than spectacle, this series consistently delivers.
