Khepera Rising by Nerine Dorman

I've been reading so much recently and some excellent books that I don't want to forget that which has made me go WOW. And definately Khepera Rising by Nerine Dorman is a book that made me say it a number of times.

The book is about James Guillaume, Jamie. He's the owner of an occult bookstore, he's boffing his boy-toy assistant and life is good. Well, almost all good. Because his mother is quite sick and he might have done a little black magic and started The Burning One's path to a little destruction.

A pair of Christian evangalists hit the town and begin tormenting, damaging and even killing those who dabble in magic. Jamie goes from being on top of the world to a quick spiral downward. The amazing thing about this book is that Jamie is the ultimate anti-hero. There's no possible way to truly like him or admire him. There's very little about Jamie to make him a hero except....he tries to protect the people who are practising magic. He cares about stopping the violence. Yet, he himself is also violent and living a life that might need to be stopped (or changed).

 Jamie is a complicated character and I admired how Ms. Dorman didn't back off from showing him and his flaws. I disliked a number of the things he did and I hated some of his choices yet part of the fascination of reading this was exactly for those reasons. There are many layers to the story from the relationship between Jamie and his ex-girlfriend to Jamie and the evangalists and even Jamie and The Burning One (the demon he summons).

We hope to have Ms. Dorman do a guest post one day about writing the anti-hero because in this story there's the perfect anti-hero in Jamie. You want him to win yet you dislike him.

One of the other things I really liked was that the way ultimately that justice was brought was via the bad guy's own humanity and flaws. Because despite everything, that's much of what this book was about. The flaws that define people and the ways we live and die by them.

There is a second book called Khepera Redeemed which I just bought and look forward to reading.

If you're interested in a book that dares to go somewhere most don't, if you like a man who is flawed and possibly not redeemable, this is a book worth checking out.