Eve of Chaos is the third book in S.J. Day’s Marked series, following Eve of Destruction. It isn’t necessary to have read the first two books to go ahead and jump into the series with this volume. The author integrates summaries of the relevant back-story, and most of the action is self-contained despite it finishing up the story arc started with Eve of Darkness.
This book picks up, as the second book did, after a brief delay from the end of the previous one. It has now been six weeks since the disappearance of the archangel Raguel into the underworld and the promotion of Alec to archangel to fill the empty seat at the head of the American firm. Eve is more disturbed than anyone else that no effort seems to be being made to rescue or ransom the archangel back. But Eve doesn’t have much time to brood over the situation—now that she has graduated and attained her full Mark status, she is going out almost daily on hunts for rogue Infernals…and more and more keep crossing her path in her personal life. Because, she discovers, Sammael (Satan) has put a bounty on her head either as a punishment for killing his last, best, and favorite hellhound or as a way to disrupt the Mark system, since killing the favorite of two of the most senior members would cause waves all the way down.
And Eve is even more firmly the favorite of both Alec and Reed now than she was before her graduation. She has been dating both of them casually, and finds herself falling deeper into a relationship with Reed as Alec pulls further away emotionally (hazard of being an archangel). Both of them refuse to let her go, and she refuses to choose between them, even as an insidious darkness in Alec begins to make his brother seem not just the better but the only choice….
To complicate matters even further, Sammael offers to make a deal with Eve: he’ll lift the bounty if she’ll deliver a message from him to Alec and Reed’s mother. She has no choice but to agree, and hope that the devil can be relied upon to keep his word—and that she can find a way to use their bargain to save Raguel…and, by extension, Alec.
So, as I mentioned above, this book concludes the initial storylines, specifically those of Eve’s training, her acceptance of her Mark, and the mystery of the masking agent that allows Infernals to hide themselves from Marks’ senses. The end of the book hints at a resolution to the love triangle, but we don’t see which brother it is in the scene. Clearly it’s meant to keep the possibility of future books dangling but serve as a stopping point for a few months or a year (after three books released between April and July), or, if the series does poorly, an ending.
Personally, I thought this book was the weakest of the three. Overall I think it had less action and more love triangle than it should have—by the halfway point I was skimming the “romantic” sections, and it made the rest of the book read quickly, indeed. Also, the explication of previously unanswered questions came a bit too quickly and too glibly for my tastes. It was necessary for the tension of the story (and also for the plotted events) that none of the answers be revealed, but then at the end Eve acknowledges suspicions that the readers were never told of. That kind of veiling of key thoughts is not the most graceful way to handle a mystery, because it then makes the final events seem orchestrated and not inevitable.
Aside from that, the events of the story were on par with the other stories in terms of how much happened and the level of excitement and interest it generated for the reader. And Day at least attempts to address the reasons for Eve’s continuing agnosticism in the face of pretty irrefutable proof of God’s existence, which I appreciated, even if I didn’t find the explanation that compelling. Faith or lack thereof is an intensely personal matter, and in my opinion it’s difficult to comprehend someone else’s view on the matter, so I can’t take too much issue with the fact that I didn’t comprehend Eve’s view; I was just happy to have it expressed.
Basically, this third book continues in the same vein as the series started: it’s fast, fun beach reading, so if you’re shopping for something with plenty of demons getting outmuscled, outsmarted, or outranked by the maneuverings of a half-Asian sexpot, keep this series in mind.
Paperback, July 2009. Buy it now at Amazon!
