Review: Divine Misdemeanors by Laurell K. Hamilton

Back Cover Blurb:

You may know me best as Meredith Nic Essus, princess of faerie. Or perhaps as Merry Gentry, Los Angeles private eye. In the fey and mortal realms alike, my life is the stuff of royal intrigue and celebrity drama. Among my own, I have confronted horrendous enemies, endured my noble kin’s treachery and malevolence, and honored my duty to conceive a royal heir—all for the right to claim the throne. But I turned my back on court and crown, choosing exile in the human world—and in the arms of my beloved Frost and Darkness.

While I may have rejected the monarchy, I cannot abandon my people. Someone is killing the fey, which has left the LAPD baffled and my guardsmen and me deeply disturbed. My kind are not easily captured or killed. At least not by mortals. I must get to the bottom of these horrendous murders, even if that means going up against Gilda, the Fairy Godmother, my rival for fey loyalties in Los Angeles.

But even stranger things are happening. Mortals I once healed with magic are suddenly performing miracles, a shocking phenomenon wreaking havoc on human/faerie relations. Though I am innocent, dark suspicions of banned magical activities swirl around me.

I thought I’d left the blood and politics behind in my own turbulent realm. I had dreamed of an idyllic life in sunny L.A. with my beloved ones beside me. But it becomes time to wake up and realize that evil knows no borders, and that nobody lives forever—even if they’re magical.

For fans of: Laurell K. Hamilton (LKH)

A little background on the series: Merry is a faerie princess, one of the sidhe, the high royals of the Fey. When she didn’t show signs of immortality or powerful, deadly magic as a child, her aunt, Queen Andais of the Unseelie throne, blames the lack on her part human heritage and tries to kill her. Repeatedly. Eventually, Merry is forced to flee to LA to save her own life from the assassination attempts and hides out by pretending to be human. Her cover gets blown in the first book, A Kiss of Shadows, and the Queen’s captain of the guard and deadliest assassin, Doyle, takes her back to the Unseelie Court where, surprisingly, she is announced co-heir to the throne. Andais has now made Merry and Andais’s sadistic son Cel equals and vows to step down from the throne on one condition: one of them has to get pregnant first. Merry is given her choice of the Queen’s Guard, an elite and incredibly good looking group of men who have been celibate for about 1,000 years due to Andais’s cruel commands. The series pretty much follows her attempts to get pregnant (read: lots and LOTS of sex with many different men), find a husband, or rather, the lucky man who gets her preggers, and oh, yeah: survive. Cel wants Merry dead really, REALLY badly, and so do a quite a few of the other sidhe because she’s mortal and isn’t considered “pure” enough racially to rule. There’s a ton of politics, some crime solving, and did I mention the SEX?

I was a little surprised when I saw that Hamilton’s Meredith Gentry series was continuing after Swallowing Darkness. I thought that Swallowing Darkness had done a great job of wrapping up loose ends and didn’t really feel the need for a sequel. So when I saw Divine Misdemeanors, I was curious. What was Merry going to do now? In Swallowing Darkness, she is pregnant, she’s won and then rejected the Unseelie throne, which has been her goal from the beginning of the series, kills her cousin Cel, the main antagonist, saves all of her husbands (she was impregnated by six men and thus marries them), and is supposed to be living Happily Ever After.

Apparently, LKH was setting the stage for a new period in Merry’s life. Merry and her harem have gone back to LA and are trying to support themselves and the 100 plus people Merry has won to her side over the course of the series by returning to work for the private detective firm Merry used as her cover in A Kiss of Shadows. The lesser fey, or in other words, anyone NOT sidhe, are getting murdered in ways that resemble children’s book illustrations and Merry and her men (does anyone else think of Robin Hood when they hear that?) are called in to consult with the police.

That’s the only thing the back cover is really right about. I mean, yes, Merry confronts Gilda, and yes, the people she healed are doing amazing stuff, but those incidents were not the focus of the book as the blurb would have you believe. Rather, the focus is on the murders, Merry, her men, and the repercussions of the choices she made in giving up the throne.

Most of the book deals with the conflicts brought up when Merry gave up the Unseelie crown. Some of her followers don’t like that decision and it causes rifts in previously solid relationships. Andais has gone crazy over the loss of her son and is torturing people left and right back in Faerie, which creates guilt for Merry and adds more stress to her life. The pregnancy has all of the men in a tizzy and they’re being a little overprotective. Merry’s fame is starting to get in the way of her ability to do her job, not to mention her life. New responsibilities are cropping up and lead to even more problems. Her allies are suddenly looking for ways out of their alliances, and Merry has to contend with that, too.

There’s some politics in this novel, but nowhere near the amount in previous books in the series. The action is almost nonexistent, too, which is a huge change of pace from the earlier books. I was a little thrown off by the change, but I enjoyed the slower plot and the fact that in Divine Misdemeanors we got to see more of the romantic side of Merry and the interplay with the men. The sex scenes, while still there, aren’t as BDSM as previous ones and now that there’s no rush to get preggers, it’s a lot more relaxed and sweet, too. Plus, some of the guards I wanted her to share some sweet lovin’ with in previous books finally get their turns.

One of my only complaints is that it barely mentions Merry’s rapist uncle in passing, and I wanted to see that sucker SUFFER. Another complaint I had was that, as is typical with LKH books, there are so many well done characters that have appeared in other books, she can’t do justice to them or even fit face time for some them into Divine Misdemeanors. The focus on crime and romance reminded me of LKH’s Anita Blake series more than the Merry series, but they weren’t overwhelmingly similar.

Overall, I really enjoyed the book. I liked seeing Merry’s life head in a new direction and I loved seeing the men in a different light. I liked that the book went back to LA and had a more modern setting that I could relate to a little better. Would I read the next in the series? Yes, I’m looking forward to the next book more than I was for some of the previous releases. Would I read this again? I already have. ;D

My Grade: B+