Summon the Keeper

"Tanya Huff is one of the mothers of urban fantasy as we currently recognize the genre. She was there pretty much from the beginning. She was one of the first people writing really detailed vampire detective fiction, which is something we are very, very fond of. And for some reason, while she has always performed solidly—there’s been a TV adaptation of one of her series, and she’s been publishing consistently for more than thirty years now—most people don’t know her. And I just don’t understand that! Summon the Keeper was the first book in the Keeper Chronicles . It’s about a woman named Claire Hansen. She’s a keeper: she uses magic to keep reality from unravelling, basically. She gets called to come and take care of a hotel that has a hell gate in the basement, and another keeper who is kind of evil stuck in one of the rooms, and she needs to try to figure out how she’s going to fix this—how she’s going to close the hell gate and keep literal hell from getting loose. And, because it’s an urban fantasy, figure out how she’s going to deal with the fact that there are two hot guys she’s into. One of them is a ghost and is very, very dead. The other is technically her employee—and that makes things a little awkward. There are three books in the Keeper Chronicles . I loved all three of them, and then Tanya just stopped. She went off to write other things. She has since become a friend of mine, and I finally did get to ask, “Why did you stop?” If you pull up the cover to Summon the Keeper , you will find that the main cover, at least of the U.S. edition, is dominated by this black and white cat. His name is Austin. In this series, when angels come to earth to try and maintain the order of things and work with keepers, they always take the form of cats. So Austin talks to Claire. He is her guide. He helps her through this book. He was Tanya’s cat. And when he died, she could no longer continue the series. And I didn’t understand that at the time—it didn’t make sense to me. Unfortunately, I am now aware of why someone would do that. So I have a lot of empathy for these books. They’re beautifully written. Her love for the setting and for her cats comes through on every page. And I miss Austin very much."