Snarky. Fiery. Oozing with slick sarky characters that slink between a clashing mix of vibrant and gothic settings.

This is addictive from the get-go. It’s the anti-Twilight with all its dark sarcasm and witty cynicism; a dank alternate-universe Mexico City, linking indigenous mythologies and a touch of fantasy sci-fi; and characters who are devious, bent little cusses with cracked and seeping too-honest personalities they can’t keep under wraps despite their best efforts. Loved em all less than 20% of the way into the novel.

And then along came the feisty female single mother detective with a smoking habit she doesn’t want to kick and four-hundred bitter chips on her broad middle-aged shoulders. Oh yah, it’s a detective novel too. Score.

This is never YA, hadn’t thought it was as it wasn’t sold as such, not from the synopsis or summaries, even if it is partly about younger adults—but their lives are definitely not ‘sheltered middle-class’ young adult material. No, it’s full of crass heartless vampires, modified animals and the modern descendants of ancient Aztec mythological beings, mysticism, mariachis, and murder, and a whole sloppy mess of gory gore, foul language, cartel-style crime, sex, murder, and skewed morals—a marvellous irresistible melee of blunt unrestricted writing that snaps open a plot bursting surprises around every dark alley, in every cliché café, from the pages of cult comic book allusions, and ending in a full-blown disastrous and explosive finale. This novel defines a Neo-Noir genre that dips into sci-fi, fantasy, pulp-fiction, and delivers a modernised mythology about the world of vampires we never really ever want to run into in secondary school but are still obsessing over anyway long into adulthood.

Terribly Compulsive.