Sympathy for the Devil

Sympathy for the Devil (2011) Justin Gustainis

I came to this series because I very much enjoy his Occult Crimes Unit Investigations (despite the horrific covers), so I’ve been slowly working my way through his Quincy Morris series. Slowly, because I just don’t enjoy it anywhere near as much as the other series.

I started this book ages ago (I’ll frequently start books on my phone, and then once I get into a book, finish reading it on my kindle), and picked it up to finish because I’m sick and wanted something easy to read.

The story begins in three parts–a presidential candidate and his aide meeting with a black magic practitioner who has offered to raise a demon for them, Qunicy Morris helps take part in an exorcism, and Libby Chastain is contacted by a sister witch who found the taint to black magic on a co-worker.

I’m not really sure what it is about this series, that I haven’t taken to it the way I did the other series (which doesn’t seem to have any new books) but it might be because I don’t really care for Quincy very much. I don’t dislike him, he’s just not anyone I really want to spent a lot of time with.

There is one character in this book that I quite enjoyed, and that was Malachi Peters, a CIA assassin killed in the late 80s and brought back from Hell for a special job.

He’d been utterly unprepared for the digital revolution, and it had just about blown his mind. That had lasted two hours. Then he had decided that he fucking loved it.
…
His new computer sat on the oak desk the Hay-Adams provided for its guests, and next to it were piled The Idiot’s Guide to the Internet, PCs for Dummies, and several other books with insulting titles that promised to teach you the basics – just in case you were from Mars, or had spent the last thirty years in Hell, or something.

(T)he relevant factors were always the same: access, termination, and egress. Or as his instructors at The Farm in Virginia liked to call it, “Getting in, getting it done, and getting out.”

To Peters, it seemed like the third stage was going to be the hardest. It usually was – for the first two, you had surprise on your side. But by the time you got to egress, if you lived that long, everybody was after your ass.

Sadly, Mal Peters wasn’t in that much of the book.

I did find the conclusion / resolution of the story to be interesting, which helped the book quite a bit.
Rating: 7/10

Published by Solaris

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