Warning – minor spoilers ahead, since these are the seventh and third novels in their respective series.
“There are few things on this planet that you truly should do, but trying your best to love everyone is one of them, and you do it by making the choice that you will.”
“Even the impossible to love ones?”
“Especially them.”
While I can certainly imagine this interaction between Jesus and one of his friends, I can’t say that I expected to see it in a series that featured him as platonic BFFs with a gay media mogul, took a couple of detours to dream sex with angels, and is named after his sister, Jessica.
Yet, here we are.
This last installment of the Jessica Christ series is perhaps H.’s* finest writing to date. From a practical standpoint, this makes sense because seven books in, you’d expect an author to have such a finely tuned image of the world they’ve created. From a metaphorical standpoint, it had to be: after six books of setup, Jessica is precisely where she is supposed to be, whether she wanted to be there or not. Taylor had to bring her A-game to wrap up all the threads she’s got dangling out there.
Over the years we’ve seen Jessica confront evil on both the small scale and the temptations-of-Satan scale. We grew up with her, navigating friendships, her first period, high school football, college sororities, and small business ownership. We’ve been privy to her internal dialogue with her Father and seen her pull off some of the oddest miracles you could imagine. All through this, she has been drawn inexorably toward her ministry: to bring peace to one of the World’s Great Empires. And here we are.
While consistently full of Taylor’s wry humor, the opening quote is indicative of this novels’ more serious bent toward social justice themes. This should be unsurprising: Jesus and Jessica are half-siblings, after all. And while I imagine that when she plotted out the series, Taylor was not expecting to publish JC7 in the middle of the mainstream acceptance of the Black Lives Matter movement, I can’t help but think that that, along with three and a half long years of the Trump presidency, had some impact on the final product. Whatever the reason, I found this episode to be the most satisfying of all.
To be clear: Jimmy is still creating chaos, the White Light Church is as crazy as ever and Destinee McCloud is just as over the top as she always has been. Everything that I loved about the first six books isstill here, just with that little something extra. It’s a great ending to a great series.
If you don’t mind a little blasphemy with your humor, this is a good enough series that even after buying the ebooks, we ordered paperbacks straight from the author to support her writing career. If you’re curious about the series but not ready to take the plunge, you can read a free short story featuring Jessica here
Killhaven Police Book 3: Shift out of Luck
While “Brock Bloodworth” is a figure with something of a sketchy past, H. Claire Taylor’s husband is a police officer in Texas, so as far as police procedurals go, this one’s got some pretty good fact-checking. Well, maybe not fact-checking per se (the vampires, were-things and such are probably imaginary), but at least the procedure part is probably right.
This is the third story featuring Normal Green, the only pure human on the Kilhaven Police’s Fang 900 shift. In a way, he’s kind of like Judy Bunny from Zootopia: all he has to keep himself alive and serving-and-protecting in a world filled with paranormal predators is his heart and determination. After his initial training in book one with his werewolf FTO, Heather Valance, Green has hit the streets for real, chasing down meth-addled lycanthropes, breaking up leprechaun fights, and discovering that not everything in Kilhaven (and the rest of the world) is quite what the powers that be want people to think.
This is where we find him in Shift Out of Luck. The first two books hinted at something being not quite right between the vampires and the rest of the population. There is, at least on paper, a truce in place that keeps everything peaceful. But when Green, Valance, and others in the Fang 900s start to connect the dots between missing were-children and violent flare-ups in other parts of the world, it becomes clear that the established social orders aren’t just crumbling, they may have already collapsed.
Just as with the Jessica Christ series, these books aren’t for kids. There’re sex and violence and drug use and all the things you would expect from books with this sort of premise. Who they are for is anyone who likes detective stories and is up for a clever, paranormal twist on the genre. I tore through this one the day it came out and I can’t wait for book four.
*I like to think myself funny by referring to her as H. rather than Claire. I’m probably not, but I like to think so anyway.