Previous books:
1.) Undead and Unwed
2.) Undead and Unemployed
3.) Undead and Unappreciated
4.) Undead and Unreturnable
5.) Undead and Unpopular
6.) Undead and Uneasy
7.) Undead and Unworthy
8.) Undead and Unwelcome
Summary: This book picks up where the last one took off. Laura the antichrist went towards the dark side while her sister Betsy the Queen of the Vampires was with the Wyndham Werewolves and now she feels bad about it so she has been keeping a low profile. Betsy is still mourning (or refusing to mourn) the deaths of Garrett and Antonia. Baby Jon has been found to be impervious to supernatural harm. Mark is still dateless and Jessica is still mourning the loss of her relationship with Detective Nick. Tina and Sinclair are still running the undead and making money. Now the thanksgiving holiday is coming up and Laura gets in touch with Betsy to go shopping and tries to make up for her actions. After a trip to the mall and a movie night with Laura, Betsy comes home to Eric Sinclair (her husband) and starts a meaningless fight with him. It is about how thanksgiving is symbolic of the oppression of minorities including women and how Sinclair is a rich white man so he wouldn’t know anything about being oppressed. After the fight Betsy storms out and finds herself in the Library with the book of the dead. The devil shows up and starts stuff when Jessica walks in on her and Betsy. When the Devil starts talking about Jessica’s parents being in hell Betsy bashes a book stand on her. The devil tells Betsy that she is forgiven and when she needs to summon the devil the next day she will know how to get in touch. Then the next day Betsy decides she has been mad at Sinclair long enough so she goes to him but when she tries to talk to him he is mean and cold and tells her to leave him alone he is tired of her selfishness. She then gets a call from Laura asking for help and not wanting to face Sinclair she goes to pick up her sister. She finds that her sister woke up naked in the spoon of the Minneapolis sculpture garden after having bad dreams. Apparently this is not the first time she had had bad dreams and blacked out but she didn’t want to tell anyone. While there some men try to gang rape them so Betsy uses them to feed off of. They go back to Betsy’s house and decide they have to call the devil to see what is going on with Laura. The devil says that Laura needs to tour hell and learn how to use her fallen angel side or else she will go crazy and Betsy needs to go with her. So they decide to take a tour of Hell.
SPOILERS!!! (highlight to read!!)
So they pack for a trip and in Betsy’s room she finds that Sinclair left her a note so she packs that too. However, after bargaining on what the devil will have to give them to come along the devil knocks out Betsy leaving her bag at the house. This is physical contact is apparently the way to get to hell dimension. After a tour of the hell dimension and a conversation where the devil tells them that the reason she had a baby was because she wants Laura to take her job so that she can retire they are told that Laura must learn to time travel and Betsy needs to go along. So Laura knocks Betsy out and when she comes to they are in Salem during the Witch trials. They hear a man named William Putnam charging a woman with witchcraft and the woman gets so angry she accuses him of framing her because she wouldn’t marry him and give him her land. Betsy is intrigued by her courage so she goes to rescue the woman whose name is Caroline. She then proceeds to tell the entire town of Salem off for being bigots and ridiculous people doing the devil’s work in god’s name. Then she and Laura leave. Then they travel in time to a barn where they meet Eric and Erin Sinclair two young twins who are moving to live with their aunt Tina. After the kids are called away Laura and Betsy leave again and are taken to around the 1920’s where a funeral for Eric Sinclair’s parents is being held. Betsy learns that Erin Sinclair went off to college where she was hit on by a vampire and when she didn’t reciprocate he killed her. Then her parents came to find out what happened to her and they were killed. They find out that Tina thinks the vampire was trying to get even with her by killing the closest thing she had to a family. Tina then plans on leaving Sinclair to go get back at the Vampire but Betsy talks Tina into turning Eric. Then she realizes that he rose as a strong Vampire because she needs to bite him first. After biting him and making sure that Tina plans to turn him they leave. Then they travel to the night that Betsy bit detective Nick. She saves Nick from herself at the price of Laura who gets bit instead. Then they travel to the same night that she fights with Sinclair and saves Mark so they find the younger Betsy and Sinclair in the cemetery from the first book. After a fight past Betsy and Sinclair go separate ways. So Future Betsy goes to Sinclair and tells him that he has to go after past her and be charming and annoying because eventually they fall in love and are happy together. Lastly they are taken to the future in 3000 where future Betsy is creepy and inhuman and Baby Jon is still alive and Mark is a creepy insane Vampire. Laura and Betsy don’t find anyone else they know there but the landscape is completely frozen and it’s the in the summer. Betsy and Laura split up to do recon and Betsy finds out that future Betsy uses Zombies as her servants. They don’t learn much more but we learn that Tina somehow betrayed Betsy and Sinclair didn’t stick with Betsy so Betsy made the Book of the Dead out of Sinclair’s Flesh. We also learn that Betsy locked Mark up in a coffin for 50 years which drove him mad. And Future Betsy is working with Future Laura who is the new leader of the hell dimension. When Betsy returns home she finds out that Nick and Jessica are living at their house and are pregnant. Also Nick and Betsy are Great friends. She also finds out that Sinclair’s note to her was telling her that he loved her and he hated picking a fight with her but he knew that she had to go to hell and travel trough time with Laura. She also learns that Caroline was a relative of Tina’s who survived thanks to Betsy and that her family passed down stories of the two beautiful angels who saved Caroline. Lastly Laura decides that she needs to take over the job from her mother so that she and Betsy will have more knowledge and more chance to change the future.
Review:
This series was always great to me. It was a light and funny read that I could pick up when I had down time or when I needed a pick-me-up. I loved the character of Betsy because to me she was just what a modern woman would be like if she suddenly woke up one day to find out she had died and risen as the queen of people previously thought of as fictional. I loved the situations she was put in and the fact that normally it was her friends who got her out of it. That said somewhere along the line the stories and the characters became less funny and light and more dark and twisty. Betsy was a entertaining shallow blonde of the modern world but lately it has become not a funny shallow but an infantile hurtful shallow that doesn’t notice anything but her own problems and doesn’t try. This pattern of dark and twisty continued on in this book and Betsy’s self absorbed selfishness became an irritation I didn’t think I could get past. However, just as I was going to put the book down about 100 pages in it started to change. Betsy seemed to grow more and more and realize her mistakes and try to straighten up. While Laura was seeming to embrace her devil side. I truly got into the story that was starting to form and was loving the direction it was going in. Alas the book ended with a major cliff hanger and more questions posed than answered. That said I do plan on reading the next one because Betsy’s character seemed to be changing her annoying ways and the story Davidson was setting up is attention getting. I didn’t really like this book but I am hoping that it was a stepping stone setting up the plot points we needed to have before we could continue so I have great hope for the next book and when it comes out I will be reading it.
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