I am going to try my best to talk about this book without sounding like a total fangirl (which I am). The first instalment in Daniel José Older’s Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series had me from the first paragraph. Well, let’s back it up. I heard about this book on Twitter and shortly after its release I purchased it on my Kindle. I have a TBR list that’s constantly growing so I knew it would probably be a while before I got around to reading this book. Luckily I was following Mr. Older on Twitter and to be quite honest his tweets nudged me to move his book to the top of my pile. I figured that if the content of his tweets was anything to go by, his book had to be pretty sick. I wasn’t wrong.

Half-Resurrection Blues (HBR) centers around Carlos Delacruz, a half dead being that straddles the worlds of the living and the dead. He’s a sort of mercenary for the New York Council of the Dead, dragging errant ghosts back to hell by bestowing upon them the deeper death with his sanctified blade. The world that Older builds is amazing and the end left me wanting more. I could spend all of my free time with these characters. Except the Ngks, those things gave me the creeps, In my mind, they look something like Gollum from LOTR.

The prose weaves in foreign words without apology, they aren’t treated as foreign at all. Much like I mentioned in my review of Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her, I enjoy this as it expects the reader to either know it or look it up.

The cast of characters is diverse and unlike any other fantasy book I’ve ever read. The villain, Sarco, is one of those villains that has you ready to side with him. He’s not evil in the obvious way. He’s too intelligent and calculated for that. The one character I wish we had spent more time with is Sasha. She really intrigued me. Perhaps she will be fleshed out more in future instalments*. She’s a strong woman and her portrayal left me with nothing to gripe about.

Bottom line: read this book!

*After writing this I listened to an interview with Older where he said that book three is told from Sasha’s POV! I’m very excited about this.