Fury of the Demon by Diana Rowland

Review of Fury of the Demon by Diana Rowland, book 6 in the Karen Gillan series. “Cop and conjurer of demons, she’s a woman in danger of losing control to a power that could kill.”

Karen Gillan series

Mini review of the first Karen Gillan series

I read all of this series in about a month this year and it had me glued to the pages. The female protagonist is a very capable police officer who summons demons in her spare time. She has to hold her own in a male dominated world but has good male friends who has her back. She also have a friendship with another female and a strong relationship with her aunt. There is a good mystery, it is funny, entertaining and has great snark. This is very much in the angry trousers category and it is very good.

My review of Fury of the Demon by Diana Rowland

Fury of the Demon has great world building and wonderful friendships. It does however have some problems in how it uses sexual violence as flavor. The pacing is a bit uneven. If you read the books one after another some of the themes gets a little repetitive. The series as a whole is however a really good urban fantasy series, that I do recommend.

My review from 2014 of Fury of the Demon by Diana Rowland

Title: Fury of the Demon
Author: Diana Rowland
Series: Kara Gillian, book 6
Genre: Urban fantasy, murder mystery
Content warning: Graphic torture and mention of rape and

I have enjoyed the Kara Gillian series so far. I have enjoyed enough to read the first five books over the course of two months and seeking out a second series by Diana Rowland. However this book disappointed me.

However, about halfway through the book I noticed that I didn’t really want to go back to reading it. I was mostly reading it to get it over with so I could read something else. I found myself reading comics instead. Fury of the Demon is not that it is a bad book, it just failed to grab me and suck me in the way the other books did.

Kara’s trust issues are getting a bit old by now. I totally 100 % understand why she has them, but they are getting tiresome to read about because of her constant blowup temper. She blows up and her trust in a friend totally fails her for about 10 minutes while she verbally abuse the friend. When she goes to cool off, sees the error of her ways and apolidice. One or two times that would be fine ok, we get it she is damaged (and with good reason). But five or six times in the course of the book, that is just getting old to me. I hate it when misunderstandings (especially stupid ones) has to be the tension in a romance plot, it is boring and a bit lazy. The people she is having tensions with… it isn’t like there are plenty of real reasons why they should be having troubles.

There is a LOT of sitting around doing trivial stuff in this book. I don’t think we need quite as many scenes of Kara doing mundane tasks while she don’t know what to do. It really slows down the story. To me much of Fury of the Demon felt like filler in between two interesting books. The last book was great! This one, not so much.

Rape

I am not triggered by rape in fiction as I don’t have any personal experience with it. As most women I think it is a pretty barbaric and horrific thing to do other human beings. I think it has its place in fiction. It can make sense to include rape in fiction. Read Jim C. Hines post about writing rape please. But it has to be there for a reason. I can’t stand it when abuse of any kind – especially sexual abuse – is there just to up the ante.

In Fury of The Demon a woman is killed, tortured, raped and sodomized. Rowland you already murdered and tortured the poor woman, what purpose does it serve to also rape her. The antagonists were already very unsympathetic, brutal and barbaric. I don’t think it serves any purpose whatsoever let the woman be raped, other than to trigger the readers. To me that just seemed gratuities (which is not a word I use lightly) and rather pointless.

Ok what did I like in Fury of the Demon then, I did give it 3 stars after all so I didn’t totally hate it. The world building is still really interesting. There are some lovely friendship scenes and some lovely dialog. The action scenes, while chaotic and a bit hard to follow, are exciting and the stakes are super high. There were parts of the story where I was glued to the page (like the last 25 %).

Ok let’s sum up. A decent part of a great series with some rocky bits and some quite funny and lovely bits as well.

The stats: Fury of the Demon

Published: 2014 by DAW
Length: 484 pages
Read: January 18 to 29, 2014

Author: Female, white, United States
The protagonists: Kara Gillian, straight, white, demon summer, police officer, able-bodied.
Setting: Beaulac, Louisiana, USA, present day

This review was originally posted: February 2, 2014. Updated and edited July 1, 2023