Hell’s Half-Acre

About the series

Pleasant Bottom sits on top of a hellmouth and has done business with it for longer than anybody still alive is willing to lay out plainly. The arrangement worked, more or less, for a good while. It is not working now, because the town has fallen behind on what it owes, and the thing underneath has a collector.

The books follow Gray Dunn, who came into the job through an ad on a corkboard and is the seventh man to wear the star since the payments started slipping. He is not a lawman by training or by temperament. He repossessed cars, which turns out to transfer better than you would expect, because most of that work was turning up somewhere he was not wanted and being harder to shift than the people who wanted him gone.

Around him there are three women who each decide, for their own reasons, that the new sheriff is worth keeping upright: his deputy, who dug the graves for the previous six; the woman who runs the diner and still carries a scar off the last Tallyman that came through; and a necromancer working out of the strip mall who has been sitting on the lid of the thing since 1963.