Smoulder

YOU'D think spending centuries surrounded by soul-snatching demons might be enough to leave your average half-demon, half-fallen angel in a bad mood.

YOU'D think spending centuries surrounded by soul-snatching demons in a place called Pandemonium might be enough to leave your average half-demon, half-fallen angel in a spectacularly bad mood.

But Daphne, the heroine of Smoulder, seems remarkably circumspect about the whole thing.

Not even her mother's habit of showing up in the nearest reflected surface and barking orders at her daughter seems to faze her - she's instead content to roam around Hell, alternating between televised episodes of North By Northwest and the public torture of Lost Souls who have been exiled to the Pit.

That all changes when Daphne's half-brother announces he's fallen in love with a human and will be relocating to Earth.

Given the number of demented butchers and body-snatching weirdos he's leaving behind, you'd have to imagine that small-town US wouldn't exactly present much of a threat but his demon-feet have barely had time to hit the ground when he's abducted by a fellow immortal called Azrael and Dark Dreadful (who apparently couldn't decide between adjectives so shoehorned them both into the world's least scary name).

The point is, Daphne's mother Lilith is unable to leave Pandemonium and neither is she willing to dispatch one of her other useless daughters to find him (Lilith, we're told, gets around, leaving a trail of feckless baby-daddies in her wake) so Daphne is swiftly sent in her place.

What follows is a surprisingly engrossing series of plot twists, with Daphne forced to negotiate newly acquired demonic powers, the attentions of a couple of homicidal fallen angels and her growing attraction to the last human her brother came into contact with.

As fantasy reads go, this is well-paced, well-executed and, for fans of the genre, well worth staying with.

VERDICT: Builds to a fiery climax

Smoulder, Brenna Yovanoff, Simon & Schuster, $19.99.