Working for the Devil is the first Dante Valentine novel by Lilith Saintcrow.
Finished on: 19.9.2025

Content Note: racism

Plot:
Dante Valentine is a necromance, and she is pretty good at her job. When that means that Lucifer’s right-hand man Jaf turns up on her doorstep and brings her right to hell, Dante is not particularly happy. It gets even worse because the Devil wants to hire her to track down a rogue demon – a demon she has a very personal history with. With Jaf magically tied to her, Danny has very little time to fulfill the contract.

A few years ago, I found the entire Dante Valentine series in a used bookstore for the price of a paperback, so I jumped at the chance, having heard much about the series. Finally getting around to it, I have to admit though that it really isn’t up my alley. It’s basically a noir, and that just really isn’t my cup of tea.

Working for the Devil takes a while to hit its stride. At the beginning, Dante is so aggressively sassy that it was hard to take. Fortunately, Saintcrow gave her enough self-awareness that she keeps chiding herself for her runaway mouth, and allows the vulnerability that she tries to hide with it to shine through. Still, it was hard to get into at first, despite a very innovative and fantastic description of hell itself.

Once the book hits more of a flow, though, and is less occupied with explaining the world (less of that would have probably been more), it was a pretty decent, well-paced read though. The world-building with its mix of science fiction future stuff like hoverboards and a very elaborate magical system that encompasses different kinds of magic and gods is interesting enough.

I really enjoyed the book’s romantic angle. Saintcrow is a little obvious with her hints, but it works pretty nicely. But be warned, this is not actually a romance. There is no HEA. That part really sucked. Towards the end the romance turned pretty fucked up when Jaf makes changed to Dante’s body (through sex, sigh) – without her knowledge or her consent. That is not some little „protection gone awry“, that is profoundly shit. It goes over every personal boundary and is pretty much brushed away by everybody, including Dante. (It also makes the already special Dante even more special and super-powered and everything.)

The book is pretty white. It just goes to show how much awareness has grown even among white authors in the past 20 years. Everybody is white until they go to this future!Rio where some of the background characters get to be PoC, but only in a rather exoticizing way. Plus, everybody speaks this SciFi version of Spanish instead of Portuguese and that bit drove me a little crazy.

But really, the biggest problem I had with the book was that it just wasn’t for me. I just don’t like noirs, and in Dante’s glib, world-weary, working with law enforcement, doing basically private investigations and bounty hunting way, she was noir dressed up in futuristic, magical female form. That is neither a fault of the book nor of me, it’s just a bit of incompatibility. That’s why all five novels have moved to a friend’s place now where they will hopefully be appreciated a little more.

Summarizing: not great but not bad per se, just really not my thing.