Julie Kenner, Carpe Demon

Kate Connor is like a lot of us—a stay-at-home mom whose time is eaten away by carpools and cooking, playdates and Pampers. Not having worked outside the home since her fourteen-year-old was born, Kate finds, also like a lot of us, that her real-world skills are a little atrophied, her confidence in her abilities a bit tarnished. This wouldn't be a problem if her old job didn't come crashing back into her life one afternoon, crashing literally through her kitchen window in the form of a demon-possessed senior citizen intent on killing her—only about an hour before her dinner guests were to arrive, no less:

"The appetizers were in the oven, the table was set, the wine was breathing, and I was dragging a demon carcass across the kitchen floor when I heard the automatic garage door start its slow, painful grinding to the top."

Kate Connor is not, after all, quite as much like the rest of us as she at first appears.

It's a lot harder when you're pushing 40 and when, besides, the very fact that you have children renders you vulnerable. (Not for nothing do superheroes tend to avoid serious relationships, or at least to keep their non-heroic identities secret.) But Kate is ripped from her comfortable retirement when demons show up in San Diablo, a town whose cathedral houses relics so holy that Kate and her first husband Eric, also a demon hunter, had assumed it would be a safe place to raise their daughter. Now remarried (after Eric's death) to a would-be politician who knows nothing about her early career, Kate has the added burden of keeping her superheroics a secret from her family as well as her best friend, Mindy, a blessed creature who is able to provide babysitting for Kate's toddler at the drop of a hat...or of a demon. Added to this cast of characters is Kate's new alimentatore (Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans should think of Buffy's Watcher, Giles), whose job it is to work on the research end of the demon-slaying business.

Julie Kenner's Carpe Demon, the first in a new series, is a good read, charming and well plotted and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. I'm looking forward to the sophomore installment in Kenner's demon-hunting soccer-mom series.