Mini book review: Dead Harvest by Chris F. Holm

Dead Harvest, by Chris F. Holm, is a noir-tinged urban fantasy.  Sam Thornton is the narrator and a Collector who reaps the souls of bad people, sending them off to Hell.  Sam himself was collected back in the day, and little bits of his backstory are sprinkled throughout the novel, becoming pertinent to the plot as well as rounding out Sam's character.  Since he's no longer alive, Sam either inhabits and reanimates recently deceased bodies or possesses live ones, jumping from meat sack to meat sack as necessary.  This becomes a little confusing for his companions, whom he begins to gather when he refuses to do a collection: the girl he's been sent to collect is actually an innocent.  To collect her soul would cause Very Bad Things to happen, like all-out war between angels and demons ...

And right about there is where Holm lost me.  There are angels and fallen angels and demons and really terrible demons and I just wasn't able to pay attention enough to the mythology to keep everyone straight.  The story moves along at a breakneck pace but it's sparely written, without much extra to flesh out the world-building.  I like complicated plots but I also like details and pauses in the story to enrich the world I'm in.  And maybe I just don't like noir that much.  I'll tell you what I did like quite a lot: the retro cover art.