Review by Ian Keogh

What differed Jenna Harrow from other Reapers guiding souls to the underworld was that she alone couldn’t remember her death. Don’t Fear the Reaper showed the afterlife’s bureaucratic structure, and there was something suspicious about the way her boss Adira kept fobbing off her off with excuses about why Jenna couldn’t be told about her death. Stephanie Phillips constructed a memorably page-turning opening volume around those circumstances, in which Jenna learned the truth at the cost of utterly disrupting the status quo. Adira has pulled off a coup, and Jess and her friends and fellow Reapers Eddie and Marcel have been exiled to Las Vegas.

The other consequence isn’t immediately revealed here, so let’s keep it that way. However, it’s something that might sound positive in principle, but actually isn’t. Flaviano’s imaginative artwork moves fully into horror, and red has already been a favourite colour of Rico Renzi’s.

Devils & Dust does move matters forward, not least with the Fates intervening to push Jenna toward her destiny, or at least what they tell her is her destiny, but it isn’t the compact page-turner the first volume was. Jenna is separated from her friends, rejoins them again and they then meets someone Eddie knows well from the underworld. The presence of Lilah, who we know to be Jessica’s mother, has been dangled throughout, but it’s only the final chapter pulling together some threads that seems anything other than a placeholder. On the other hand, Phillips introduces several new characters, and much of how Devils & Dust ultimately scores will rest on the parts those characters play as Grim continues. One in particular is a clever personification so obvious once introduced, but it took Phillips to see that.

A first rate cliffhanger ending leads into Lust for Life.