The premise is that the events of the first book have passed but things have not entirely gotten back to normal. The town has not so much changed as it's participants have been hardened by the events of fighting the Wurm. Unfortunately, life going on has not been kind to some. Poor Auggie the shopkeeper has found himself in debt to the fallen angel Biq, Mutt is threatened with lynching for dating a white woman, and the Mayor finds himself even more immersed in the politics he's desperate to escape.
Unfortunately, things are about to get even worse as a mysterious man named Ray Zeal is coming to Golgotha to retrieve the First Murderer's Skull. He has a army of serial killers, rapists, and psychopaths that he is leading down on the town in order to acquire it. The fact he's a fallen angel like Biq makes it especially difficult to stop him. Ray Zeal is Raziel, the self-proclaimed angel of murder, and believes it is his God-given duty to slay the divine in order to bring about an endless cycle of murder as well as death. Honestly, I'm not sure how much of a different world that would be but I'm a cynic.
I liked the story and all of the various twists and turns it employs but I also note that it's somewhat similar to the original book. There's a bunch of excessively evil monsters out to destroy the entire world. Indeed, a bit too much space is devoted to the stories of the horrifying serial killers that Ray Zeal has assembled even though they're all one-dimensional monsters and sexual sadists. The story also plays out mostly the same sort of way with the townsfolk forced to put aside their greviances to band against the supernatural doomsday cult. This isn't necessarily a crippling flaw but it was a noticeable one.
Relationship-wise, I did like the way the characters developed. Malachi trying to deal with his Nephilim daughter and the fact the townsfolk loathe him for the fact he's a greedy land baron rather than anything supernatural he's done is an interesting twist. I initially liked the relationship between Constance and Jim developing, though I didn't when I remembered he was sixteen and she was fourteen. That made it all sorts of squick.
Much of the book's mid-part is devoted to the fact that the position of women in the Old West was, shockingly, not great and no one initially cares when one of the doves gets killed by a client. Even our otherwise progressive lawmen. I liked how Maud and new character, Rowan, set about to do their best to establish protections for the local working women. I found this plot more interesting than the actual apocalypse story. We get a lot more estrogen this time around and the new female characters are all entertaining.
In conclusion, this was a very fun book and had a lot of development but I didn't like it as much as the Six-Gun Tarot. I think the stories are at their best when dealing with smaller scale adventures and character development rather than trying to stop the end of everything. The villains are all very one-dimensional and I think that hurts the conflicts. Still, I'm definitely picking up the rest of the series.
