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Night Shift (Jill Kismet Novels) | 
 enlarge | Author: Lilith Saintcrow
Publisher: Orbit
Category: Book
List Price: $6.99
Buy New: $3.26
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Avg. Customer Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 40139
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 6.7 x 4.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0316001783
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780316001786
ASIN: 0316001783
Publication Date: July 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: GREAT BUY!Brand New From US Distributor! WE ARE A 5 STAR SELLER with OVER 3,500,000 BOOKS SOLD!!! OVER ~ 600,000 FEEDBACKS ~ POSTED!!!
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Product Description
Not everyone can take on the things that go bump in the night.
Not everyone tries.
But Jill Kismet is not just anyone.
She's a Hunter, trained by the best - and in over her head.
Welcome to the night shift...
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| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
 A hunter lurking in the shadows October 11, 2008
Jill Kismet works the night shift. Like the other hunters, she enforces not human law, but something more holy--and damned--the night shift deals with demons and the traders who bargain with them.
Kismet thinks she's seen just about everything, but when she gets an emergency call from the police, she realizes evil has reached new lows. The victims of mass murder appear to have been done in by a rogue shapeshifter--but there's also the stench of demon in the air. Shifters and demons are natural enemies--Kismet can't imagine even any going rogue enough that they'd link up with a demon. Still, the evidence points her in directions she doesn't want to go. Sometimes helping and sometimes hindering her, a group of shifters is also hunting the rogue--including sexy were-panther, Saul.
Thanks largely to her guilt in failing to save her teacher and mentor, Kismet is working herself to death, while paying the price she bargained with her own demon--the bargain giving her the ability she desperately needs to confront demons and win. Still, when the head of the New York demons arrives, even Kismet's demonic strength can't be enough.
Author Lilith Saintcrow creates a female version of Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden--a woman who tries to right wrongs all the while taking all sorts of physical abuse. Saintcrow introduces a bit more romance than Dresden generally gets in the sexy and domestic character of Saul, but the angst and general physical battering will feel familiar to fans of the Dresden Files. Saintcrow's writing packs punch and kept me reading, wanting to find out whether Kismet could really survive the next mess she got herself into.
I was glad to see that Saintcrow set up a richer value system than simply 'demons bad, people good.' Still, I had a bit of a hard time reconciling Kismet's willingness to commit mass murder among hellborne with her sudden morality in sparing Cenci's life. Why, if killing Cenci would make her a murderer didn't her massacre of the hellborne when she was shaking up the town be the same? Likewise, I think Saintcrow decided to take the easy way out in dealing with Cenci's pregnancy--the existance of a child should dramatically raise the stakes--and turn a nice adventure into a really moving story.
 Emotionally Numb Huntress-Girl goes on Rampage September 11, 2008
Saintcrow has been so-so for me, but until this point, she's been interesting. Enter Jill Kismet, former prostitute (who killed her pimp). Now a career hunter of the hellbreed as misguided atonement for breaking 'Thou Shalt Not Kill.'
Jill's mentor/lover recently died, and she's thrown herself into her work as an outlet. The novel opens when in the middle of a takedown scene, where Jill hasn't slept for three days. Instead Jill has chosen to obsessively hunt evil and not think. Her pager vibrates. Some new flavor of hellbreed she doesn't know a thing about has killed five cops, and Jill decides it's her newest crusade to kill it back.
Now, backing up for a bit, Saintcrow never actually explains how the hellbreed, were-creatures, and nightlife fit into her modern world. Around page 171, I began to wonder 'If these demons are so damn powerful, why exactly aren't they ruling the world?' To that question, I never found a good answer.
So anyway, in looking for clues, Jill goes on an indiscriminate rampage, killing every hell-breed she can find (not sure if they just return to hell and re-manifest in another shell, or if they are 'mortal' demons). She also takes out a few dozen 'traders,' normal humans who make deals with the hellbreed in exchange for their twisted desires. I guess Jill has a license to kill, because nothing happens excepts she bites off more than she can chew.
On this rampage, she meets a really, really strong hellbreed, and is rescued by the local hell-boss (Perry/Percival), who she's got a deal with. (And what a deal, a good 50 pages are devoted to her being emo about how she is essentially a 'trader' herself).
This novel was Jill Kismet's character meltdown, a reading experience I didn't like because the protagonist is mired in self-loathing. I'd rather have a heroine with less issues and more smarts. Saintcrow had really good descriptive gory passages, worthy of a top horror novel. Her plot was straightforward and padded out (too much) by emoting, and the action was there more for action's sake than plot movement. Hardly any romance, paranormal or otherwise.
 It deserves 3.5 stars but... September 8, 2008
Take the basics of Anita Blake circa books 4-10, sprinkle in a tiny dash of early Rachel Morgan (The Hollows), a pinch of Joanna Archer (Signs of the Zodiac) and bake it in an Underworld crust and you'd get Jill Kismet.
Marked by a Hellbreed, Jill Kismet has something the other Hunters don't: an edge. The only trouble is that being tied to Perry through his mark also means she owes him. Once a month she gets to spend some quality time with the sort of bad guys she goes out to kill every night. With Hellbreed the natural enemies of Weres, the last thing she expects is to be called in to deal with a case where a Hellbreed and a Were seem to be working together. As corpses pile up and the mystery unravels Jill has to face her personal demons before she can see the truth behind the lies. Maybe not everything she's been taught to believe about the monsters around her is true or maybe she's simply being manipulated.
This was my first book by Saintcrow. Unfortunately I had some major beefs with her first person narrative right away. I hated the snarky inner dialog moments that Jill has, they made her seem petty and immature on more than one occasion. I also found Jill to sound like an Anita Blake clone. In some ways that was good, I liked her confidence. In other ways it was bad because it felt like there was little distinction between the two in my mind's eye. I hate being this bluntly honest but it really did feel like the author took her favorite elements from other successful urban fantasy series and Frankensteined them together into her own breed of monster. Some readers will love that about the series, I found it frustrating to find any truly original part of it.
The book left a lot to be desired regarding world building. Some of the information given lacked any anchor, leaving me to guess at what the writer was trying to imply. Sometimes I got the feeling that this series (like many others lately) began in another book I hadn't read. As if pieces of the story were missing. I liked Saul a lot and truth be told I did like Jill more than I thought I would in the end. That she showed vulnerability in the end was quite compelling and made her more real to me. I'll be reading the next book and hopefully it will clear up some of the issues I've had with this first one.
A real page turner but not in a good way........ August 20, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I read this book in one day. I just couldn't wait to get it over with. There was just way too much self-analysis/self-doubt/self-hating, to the point of it taking up pages. This story just didn't grap me and I was so looking forward to it. I will read Hunter's Prayer, hopefully Jill won't be so pathetic in that book. I found Jill's character to be very depressing. Lilith is very good at describing a tortured soul but at some point the character has to be strong on the inside as they are on the outside. Without that it just seems like pages of whining flash backs.
Paranormal Police Awesome August 6, 2008
Jill Kismet is the sort of heroine we can all get behind. The book is action packed, but heart felt. It shows a world where the unexplained is dealt with by professionals, in tandem with regular law enforcement. Not the usual separation of the human and the otherworldly. When things go bump in the night, Jill is called in, so ordinary people can go on blissfully unaware. Throw in an odd symbiotic relationship with a demon, and a crush from an FBI werecat, and the story is complex and hard to put down.
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