Half-Resurrection Blues

Today's post is on Half-Resurrection Blues by Daniel Jose Older. It is the first in his Bone Street Rumba  series. It is 326 pages long and is published by Roc. The cover is blue with the main character walking towards the reader with a sword coming out of a cane. The intended reader is someone who likes urban fantasy. There is foul language,  awkward sex, and violence in this novel. The story is told from the first person close of the main character. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the back of the book- “Because I’m an inbetweener—and the only one anyone knows of at that—the dead turn to me when something is askew between them and the living. Usually, it’s something mundane like a suicide gone wrong or someone revived that shouldn’ta been.”
Carlos Delacruz is one of the New York Council of the Dead’s most unusual agents—an inbetweener, partially resurrected from a death he barely recalls suffering, after a life that’s missing from his memory. He thinks he is one of a kind—until he encounters other entities walking the fine line between life and death.
One inbetweener is a sorcerer. He’s summoned a horde of implike ngks capable of eliminating spirits, and they’re spreading through the city like a plague. They’ve already taken out some of NYCOD’s finest, leaving Carlos desperate to stop their master before he opens up the entrada to the Underworld—which would destroy the balance between the living and the dead.
But in uncovering this man’s identity, Carlos confronts the truth of his own life—and death…

Review- A very gritty urban fantasy in a colorful world but I did not like it. The world has lots of interesting characters and things going on but Carlos himself is not interesting. He is another grim, gritty tough guy with no past but he likes the ladies. The sex scenes in this novel are needless. Yes one of the plot points is that he gets a woman pregnant and how does that work, as he half-dead? But we could still have that but not have the scenes themselves. They were weird and awkward. I did not connect with any of the characters to be honest. I liked the world but if I had not been given the second ,as an ARC, in the series to read, I would not read anymore in this series.

I give this book a Two out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I bought this book with my own money.