Book Review: Brimstone Kiss, by Carole Nelson Douglas

Brimstone Kiss, the second book in Carole Nelson Douglas's Delilah Street: Paranormal Investigator series, reads like the first draft of a much better book. It opens with a recap of previous events and characters, instead of integrating such things into the story itself, and yet still often manages to remain incomprehensible to readers not familiar with the first book of the series. The plot is wandering and frequently seems to go nowhere. Scenes are contradictory and disconnected. At one point, the same line of dialogue is repeated verbatim just a few pages later.

The book is littered with awkward pop culture references. Any good author should know that if you have to stop and explain a reference, it's probably not a good reference to be making, but Delilah does exactly that every time she quotes something from television or the movies. It wouldn't be quite so bad if the author could get her explanations right, but she makes errors that should have been caught in the first read-through, like claiming to quote "Patrick McGoohan as Number Six in The Prisoner" when in fact quoting a line spoken by Number Two in the show's introduction. Douglas seems to have decided halfway through that the references weren't a good idea and given it up, but unfortunately didn't take the time to fix up the book's first half.

On the other hand, the world of Delilah Street is unique among paranormal series. After the Millennium Revelation, when normal humans finally became aware of the paranormal world, Las Vegas became populated by CinSims, Cinema Simulacrums, "live" reproductions of old film characters made from illegal zombies. Glimpses of her doppelganger and a long-dead teenage girl appear in Delilah's mirror. A vampire rock star, Snow, bestows an addictive Brimstone Kiss on his groupies, who spend their savings on concert tickets seeking after it. Delilah's boyfriend, former F.B.I. agent Ric Montoya, divines for bodies like an old farmer might divine for water.

Despite the interesting universe, there is not enough depth or resolution for a satisfactory novel. Everything revealed in the book seems to be for the purpose of continuing a series-long arc, not for resolving the novel's own plot, whatever that might be. Rather than developing the characters over the curse of Brimstone Kiss while leaving room for further development in future novels, Douglas leaves the characters mostly static. The result is a wholly unsatisfying novel in what might have been a very promising series.