Review: Crossroads of Bones

Crossroads of Bones by Luanne Bennett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This seemed like a pretty good, albeit predictable, urban fantasy.

Our heroine, Katie Bishop is a tattoo artist in Savannah, she has a team of misfit colleagues who work for her in her shop, oh and she has dragon tattoo on her back - except she was born with it. She's been having trouble sleeping, dreaming of a dead man and an intricate tattoo which fills her with dread.

When a weird guy comes in one day and requests the exact tattoo from her dreams Katie can't refuse but then she discovers the tattoo has enabled half of a demon's spirit to fully possess the unfortunate man who requested the tattoo. Now the gates of hell are opened it is only a matter of time before the other half of the spirit breaks free from the underground prison that has held it and gets its own tattoo to join the two halves together. The spirit has killed a number of other tattoo artists who either weren't strong enough or accurate enough to complete the tattoo.

Pressed into joining a secret society called the Crossroads Society Katie realises that the other half of the demon's spirit will come for her soon.

This novel is full of stock characters/ caricatures: the disgraced cop, the mysterious biker, secret societies, tattoos, cross-dressing black men (hello Sookie Stackhouse), African hoo-doo magic (hello Sookie Stackhouse #2) the sneering older man who runs the town, the bar staff who are not what they seem (hello Sookie Stackhouse #3). It also had a clever take on a new kind of shifter.

It had promise but there were points where I thought "why is Katie detouring to a biker BBQ when she has a demon to contain?" only to discover it was a plot device to shoe-horn a get-out-of-jail-free card into the plot. The novel seemed to take a long time to get to the big climax and then it was quickly disposed of in a few sentences. I still don't understand quite what happened. Maybe a glimmer of light is that Katie didn't save the day single-handed.

Overall, it was a fun read but I can't say I feel any great interest in reading the second book.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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