Apart from the fact that it's slow and rather poorly written, this so-called "supernatural thriller" fails at its central premise. I'm surprised that no reviewer here has yet pointed out the elephant in the room (well, one reviewer sort of mentioned it), but our elephant is right there and it's impossible to avoid it: You cannot sell somebody else's soul to any devil, from Satan down. Period. If there is anything most Christian religions agree on, is that. This novel's main idea is that a man has sold his not-yet-conceived son's soul to a devil and now the son, a grown man when we meet him, must try to lawyer his way out of a contract he never signed. Leather uses a lot of Christian paraphernalia and ideas to deliver a message that contradicts everything Christian doctrine teaches. Just think about it. If such a deal were possible it would be the religious equivalent of borrowing from the Mob and telling the wise guys that your neighbor, or your nephew, or Bill Gates will pay the debt, "your" debt. The Mob could take deals like that but it doesn't because it understands that such a business wouldn't work at all: there is a logic to extortion and the mafia is a business after all. And there is a logic to the idea of hell, Satan, his demons, and Heaven, God and His angels. You can't have Satan and his minions happily getting fat on souls that had nothing to do with the deal, even if those souls are corruptible, even if we apply the dubious medieval concept of Purgatory and babies who die unbaptized. What Leather, the author, does, is to take what seems like a good prop from religion (the concept of Good and Evil as metaphysical entities) and twist it to suit his novel's plot. But the whole concoction comes up burned on top and uncooked in the middle. Maybe he will explain this unholy mess in the next two books, and one way is to say that blood rules, that a father, genetically linked to a descendant, can, indeed, sell his descendant's soul to a devil. But that wouldn't save this novel or the trilogy from choosing and picking badly. One tenet that Leather ignores to the detriment of his book, and he does so because it demolishes the plot, is that people choose to sell to the devil or his minions the only thing worth pursuing, from a religious standpoint: their souls. They can't barter their children's souls away any more that they can barter what isn't theirs, because their children's souls are not theirs to barter. If we go the Calvinist route, Leather can't even write his book, since Predestination trumps everything and those who'll be saved will be saved no matter what a devil or Satan himself may want or do. And here we come to a very important point that Leather forgets in his very disrespectful romp through two thousand years of belief: this is about souls, not lives, so the stakes are infinitely higher. I am an atheist, but I understand Christianity, and one essential aspect of it is that God may seem uncaring at times, indifferent, or downright cruel to us humans, but He is never impotent, and He is never weaker than Satan and his minions. Remember, God "made" Satan and all the angels that chose to follow him in the Fall. Does it even seem remotely possible that the creator of Heaven, Earth, and the Universe, the one whose name Leather's characters invoke several times in the book, especially at the end when trying to communicate with a soul, would allow unborn children's souls to be carried away by the truckload by the likes of Azazel, Asmodeus, or, in the novel's case, Proserpine? Afraid not. It just doesn't work that way. When writing fantasy, if the writer forgets or ignores his own universe's rules, he weakens the story and may even fatally damage the entire book. Leather has chosen to write a fantasy novel using, badly, some concepts from established Christian religions, ignoring most of them, and serving us a bad attempt at the supernatural. But supernatural does not mean careless and free-for-all. The elephant is right there in the room and the whole house has collapsed around it.