Review: Death Days by Lia Cooper

Title: Death Days

Author: Lia Cooper

Length: 257 Pages

Category: Paranormal

At a Glance: This book has everything that should have made it a slam-dunk for me: age gap, taboo attraction, slow burn relationship, and more paranormal fun than you can shake a smudge stick at. Unfortunately, it was more a miss than a hit.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: By day, Professor Nicholas Littman works as an itinerant professor at a small college in the Pacific Northwest. He teaches seminars on mythology and the intersections of folklore and magic in the ancient world. By night, he’s the local necromancer, a rare magical talent that has left him alienated from other practitioners.

All Nick wants from life is to be left alone to run his magical experiments and teach kids the historical context of magic without anyone being the wiser. Unfortunately, his family is sworn to sit on the council of the Order of the Green Book—a group of magicians dating back to the Crusades—and they aren’t willing to take Nick’s no for an answer.

As though that wasn’t bad enough, a coven of Night Women has arrived in town, warning Nick that there are wolves at his door he had better take care of. But what can one necromancer do when every natural and supernatural card seems stacked against him?

Review: There are two things I want to point out about Lia Cooper’s Death Days which are no fault of the author’s: first, this book is not at all a category romance, as the publisher has it labelled. Second, this book isn’t at all explicit, at least not in a sexual sense. The slow burn tag is absolutely correct, though, almost to the point that I thought there wasn’t going to be a relationship arc at all. The one thing Death Days is explicit in, however, is the paranormal goodies, which is what I enjoyed most about this reading. The scenes in which Professor Nick Littman uses his necromantic talents on his ‘Igors’ to practice summoning demons is awesome, how they’re disposed of is gory fun, and I liked the metaphysical aspects of the story at every turn.

Nick teaches courses that don’t lend themselves to common interests with the average person, especially when he knows firsthand that the ancient thaumaturgy he instructs his students in is based a lot more in truth than in mere superstition. Nick’s supernatural lineage dates back centuries to a several-times-great grandfather and a sworn oath that his family would serve the Order, a vow Nick vehemently swears he will not be beholden to after his older brother, Martin, dies and leaves Nick next in line. His estranged, minutes-older twin sister, Nadia, is a squib (for lack of a better term), and her animosity towards Nick for potentially drawing attention to her by refusing to claim his place on the council is a means of highlighting what a loner Nick is—no family, no close friends, but he does have a teaching assistant, Josiah Wexler, whom Nick is trying hard not to be attracted to. Nick doesn’t want to be that cliché, the college professor who has the hots for his much younger student. Little does Nick know that Josiah is as attracted to Nick as Nick is to him.

Nick has been considering Josiah for an apprenticeship in his ‘side work’, if one can give necromancy and spell casting such a simplistic moniker, but how does one ask if a person is receptive to the idea of opening up holes in the fabric between the here and there to call forth demons? It’s not until Josiah is himself exposed to things not of this world that Nick confesses he is ‘other’ as well, and the plot gains some traction for it.

Having read Lia Cooper’s Blood and Bone Trilogy, I was excited to dig into this new offering from her. This book has everything that should have made it a slam-dunk for me: age gap, taboo attraction, slow burn relationship, and more paranormal fun than you can shake a smudge stick at. Of course, being familiar with an author’s work also invites some inevitable comparisons, and I have to say that I was less impressed by Death Days than I’d hoped to be. Cooper has proven she can write full-bodied characters and then create tension and friction and chemistry between them. Unfortunately, that evidence was absent here. There was never a moment where I became fully absorbed in the story, that I wasn’t aware I was being narrated to by the author, and I can only owe that to the fact I made nothing beyond a perfunctory connection to Nick, who is the point of view character throughout the novel. His personality is lackluster, and his construct is a series of details we’re told about. Josiah we don’t get to know much about at all, which is so unfortunate as, from what I can tell, I would have enjoyed getting to know him better. In fact, I may have enjoyed the story more told from his point of view. Or, it might have even worked better for me if the story were told from Nick’s more intimate first person narration.

Cooper’s narrative does have a smooth cadence to it, though the first half of Death Days is a bit slow to the point of it dragging. The pace does pick up in the second half, once Josiah is introduced to the truth that there are more things in heaven and earth than could be dreamt of in his philosophies. Overall, however, I feel this was an off-kilter offering from an author whose writing has impressed me in the past, and unless this is book one in a series, it leaves Nick dangling, stuck now in a situation that was supposed to be the bane of his entire existence, a point made a multitude of times throughout the book.

This novel is good but not great for someone who loves forming a bond with and making an emotional investment in a book’s characters, even the characters who aren’t always easy to love, but as always, YMMV.

You can buy Death Days here:
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