Review – To Hell and Back by Lilith Saintcrow (3/5 stars)

This is the 5th (and last) book in the Dante Valentine series by Lilith Saintcrow. It was okay; not as good as some of the previous ones, but okay.

The book starts with Dante (Danny) being expelled from Hell in an alley; she has taken quite a beating from Lucifer and can’t remember much of it. Lucas comes to her rescue and Danny is soon reunited with Japh. Danny finds that in her absence Japh has been tearing apart the world looking for her, and he has declared rebellion against Lucifer. In order to kill the devil Japh is determined to get a special knife that was made for hedaira to wield against demons. He has determined that Danny will use it to kill the Lucifer. Of course Japh, is also out to kill Eve and Danny is hell-bent on protecting Eve. Danny exerts her independence against Japh and makes a “hell” of a mess out of everything…again.

There were a lot of things about this book that bothered me. I don’t understand why Danny is so blindly faithful to Eve; Eve jerks her around just as much (if not more than) Japh. Danny is not blindly faithful to anyone; why should she be faithful to Eve? On the flip side Danny is horribly unfaithful to Japh. I don’t understand why. Both characters lied to her a ton; yet only one of them was supportive of her.

By the end of this book I really, really disliked Danny as a character. She was a physical and emotional mess the whole book. She rarely took any action on her own. When she did take action, the action she took seemed to be thoughtless and to just be an excuse to use power. Danny basically screwed up through this whole book.

While Japh is not a perfect character; he seemed to act at least consistently throughout the book. It would have been nice to know a bit more about Japh and his past. It would have been nice to know more about why Japh fell for Danny. The only explanation he gave was that “She treated him like a human”; you can’t tell me that that has never happened before to him in all of the thousands of years he has existed.

For some reason a lot of this book kind of got under my skin and irritated me. Maybe it was too drawn out or just too inconsistent. It left you with more questions than answers. While it was a decent ending to this series; I think it could have been better. Maybe Saintcrow will write a series about Japh or Lucas; I think they were much more interesting than Danny. I guess we will see.

We still did not find out anything about hedaira and fallen. I guess we know a little bit more but the extent of the relationship is not understood.