Saturday, August 26, 2017

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Envy of Angels (Sin Du Jour #1) by Matt Wallace


Sin Du Jour is a series of novellas/short-novels (the 220 page count of each book is kind of at the borderline) by Matt Wallace, centering on a catering company (the aforementioned Sin Du Jour) which caters to the supernatural (Demons and other things) at least partly on behalf of the government. This is the first book in the series.

As you might imagine from such a premise, this is a lighthearted series filled fun moments and wacky hijinks - this book alone contains a knife fight between chefs to second blood, an infiltration of a McDonalds-like company to steal a recipe, a server trying to weave his way between two rival demon families to pick up a dish, and more.

Long Review continues after the jump:



To sum up the plot of this one briefly - Two new chefs get called in to Sin Du Jour, a catering company to the supernatural. But when the team gets asked by the government to cook an Actual Angel of God for a group of Demons, the crew takes desperate measures to try and find a substitute dish that they can use to serve to the Demons without getting caught.

As this is the first book in the series, much of the story takes place following Lena and Darren, two chef friends who are newly brought into sin du jour on a moment's notice, nicely allowing us to get introduced to the crew at the same time they are.  It's an unoriginal way to write the first in a series, but it works here, as both Lena and Darren bring something to the table in the end, even if the book never puts either in the position of being the savior.

And more importantly, the book IS fun.  Again, it's nothing special really per se, but it's a very enjoyable story with a fun crew, and I suspect I'll be back to read the sequels (especially as the NY Public Library has them as ebooks). If you want lighthearted fun wacky urban fantasy, dealing more with crazy chefs on adventures than saving the world, you could do a lot worse than this.

No comments:

Post a Comment