Blurb: 

Twelve. Twelve of the deadliest beasts ever forged in the fires of hell have escaped onto our plane, and they want nothing more than to rip out the jugular of Charley Davidson and serve her lifeless, mangled body to Satan for dinner. So there’s that. But Charley has more on her plate than a mob of testy hellhounds. For one thing, her father has disappeared, and the more she retraces his last steps, the more she learns he was conducting an investigation of his own, one that has Charley questioning everything she’s ever known about him. Add to that an ex-BFF who is haunting her night and day, a rash of suicides that has authorities baffled, and a drop-dead sexy fiancé who has attracted the attentions of a local celebrity, and Charley is not having the best week of her life.

A tad north of hell, a hop, skip, and a jump past the realm of eternity, is a little place called Earth, and Charley Davidson, grim reaper extraordinaire, is determined to do everything in her power to protect it.

We’re doomed.

Meet Darynda Jones:

NYTimes and USA Today Bestselling Author Darynda Jones has won numerous awards for her work, including a prestigious Golden Heart®, a Rebecca, two Hold Medallions, a RITA ®, and a Daphne du Maurier, and she has received stellar reviews from dozens of publications including starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, and the Library Journal. As a born storyteller, Darynda grew up spinning tales of dashing damsels and heroes in distress for any unfortunate soul who happened by, annoying man and beast alike, and she is ever so grateful for the opportunity to carry on that tradition. She currently has two series with St. Martin’s Press: The Charley Davidson Series and the Darklight Trilogy. She lives in the Land of Enchantment, also known as New Mexico, with her husband of almost 30 years and two beautiful sons, the Mighty, Mighty Jones Boys. She can be found at www.daryndajones.com.

Excerpt:

I took the stairs to the basement. He’d been favoring the basement lately, as it had a few unused walls. I turned on my flashlight and slowed the lower I got.

“Could this place be any creepier?” Jessica asked, appearing behind me, her hands cradled at her chest as though afraid to touch anything.

“It is now,” I said, refraining from doing a fist pump and shouting, Score!

A singsong voice fluttered through the air toward me. “Somebody’s in trouble.”

I recognized the voice as Strawberry Shortcake’s—not her real name—a girl who’d drowned when she was nine. She’d taken up residence with Rocket and his little sister, Blue Bell. My gratitude with respect to that fact knew no bounds, because before SS had taken to squatting at the asylum, she was better known as a crazy stalker chick who warned me repeatedly to stay away from her brother, David Taft, a police officer in my uncle’s precinct. And she often tried to scratch my eyes out. Not an endearing quality.

Since Taft and I could barely stand each other, her concerns had never truly been an issue, but she’d seen me as a threat until her brother started dating skanks. Her words. After that, she decided I needed to date him after all. Thankfully, she was too busy being Chrissy from Three’s Company to push the issue.

Jessica and I turned toward her. SS wore her usual pink Strawberry Shortcake pajamas that were all the rage back in the day. Her long blond hair hung in tangles down her back as always, and her baby blues shimmered a silvery color, even incorporeal as she was. Though her luster had a general grayness to it, she was as solid to me as the walls around us.

The grayness often gave the departed away. And the cold. But more than that, their lack of emotion was a real tip- off —I couldn’t feel any radiating off the dead, as I could the living. Even without those signs, there was something intangible about the departed that made me instinctively know they were no longer among the living. It just registered in the back of my mind when I met someone who’d departed. I could always sense it. From the day I was born, I knew there were two kinds of people: the living and the dead.

What took me much, much longer to comprehend was the fact that not everyone was able to see the departed. My confusion had caused me problems growing up. Especially with my stepmother. But that was a story— or, well, a dozen or so stories— for another time.

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