MORE Angry Robot produce, although we’re firmly back in the ARC territory with this one.

Meet Sam. All round nice guy and Collector of Damned Souls. Nearly 100 years old and long since damned himself.

Sent on a routine job to collect the soul of a teenage girl who has murdered her whole family in front of the police, Sam makes a shocking discovery. The girl is innocent, her soul completely uncorrupted by sin.

Sam has a choice to make - disobey orders and be tortured for eternity or do his job and just maybe jump start the apocalypse.

This is another book that I picked up because of the title alone (no blurb or cover art to go on, again). Given how well that worked out for me last time, I was willing to give Angry Robot the benefit of the doubt. And I’m glad that I did.

For all that it’s about angels and demons and damned souls, there’s not all that much that’s particularly ‘biblical’ about Dead Harvest. Which is brilliant - there’s nothing like heavy-handedness to ruin a good book. I particularly liked the naming of the ultimate good and ultimate bad guys as the non-specific ‘The Maker’ and ‘The Adversary’.

I cannot sing the praises of this book nearly enough - the writing is sharp (so sharp that I suspect Chris may have cut himself while writing it); the characterisation is superb and the plot genuinely surprised me (okay, not so much the reveal of the big bad but everything else kept me right on the edge of the many seats I occupied while reading).

Whenever I read Urban Fantasy, I find myself comparing it to The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher(which are both my very favourite series of books AND my benchmark for reading the entire genre) and usually find the newcomers lacking in some area. With Dead Harvest, I genuinely believe I’ve found a series that meets all the same criteria that Butcher’s books have.

Dead Harvest and Chris F. Holm may not be my favourite Urban Fantasy (yet) but they’re definitely in a well-earned second place.