VULTURES, the sixth and final installment of the Miriam Black series is bittersweet for me.

On the one hand, I’m sad to see one of my favorite fictional characters go. On the other, I am of the opinion that giving childless characters children ruins things. See the final season of Bones for proof.

In this last book, we find Miriam pregnant with Louis’s child (I’m still mad about Louis’s death), struggling to save the child she believes dies at birth. Miriam’s motivation isn’t a desire for motherhood as much as an eagerness to rid herself of her trespasser once and for all, as prophesized by Mary Scissors.

Gabby features prominently as Miriam’s faithful companion, and there’s a new guy, Steve Wiebe, a plucky Lyft or Uber driver with only three years left to live.

When Steve, Gabby, and Miriam enlist the help of a medium to trap and eradicate the trespasser, all hell breaks loose.

I wanted to love this book. I’m not sure why I didn’t love it as much as other readers seem to have loved it. I’m on the fence between three and four stars, at least in part due to the segue where Miriam appears to go back in time to the fateful bathroom beating in a sort of “this is all a dream” sequence that made me want to put my Kindle AND the paper copy of this book in my hot tub. Tricky trespasser. Maybe it’s because I’ve been pregnant, and I don’t suspect the author has, that makes me call BS on some of the thoughts and actions throughout. Even from Miriam’s skewed vantage, this book feels less than authentic. The dialogue isn’t as fluid, the plot a little sticky… this just didn’t feel like as inspired a story as the other five before it. I’m heading out of Miriam’s world a bit heavy in the heart, because this one just didn’t quite do it for me. Three-and-a-half-stars, rounded up.
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For anyone who has not read the Miriam Black series, it's pretty wacky and wonderful, but don't start with Vultures as there are too many backstories to understand context. Miraculously, Miriam is pregnant despite a womb that was wrecked in a teenage miscarriage. But, her lover Louis is dead, killed by Wren, a rescued victim of a serial killer from an earlier book, who was possessed by the evil tormentor, The Trespasser. At the heart of the book is Miriam's continued attempts to free herself of her curse (seeing how a person dies, trying to save a victim by killing the murderer) and her efforts to keep her unborn baby and girlfriend, Gaby alive. Here she chases a killer dubbed the Starfucker, who is murdering actors. Miriam’s devil-may-care attitude, her sarcastic and biting personality, and her foul mouth are great, but they are definitely mellowing as she works to become more adult as she marches towards being a mother. Some of the twists at the end were pretty cool too.

In the final words of author Chuck Wendig: "as a final endnote to the series: we live in a particularly stupid-ass timeline, and I assume at this point that the Hadron Collider went awry and fucked shit up, and now we're paying some kind of cosmic debt. We're a country perched precariously on a needlepoint of a pin, and I don't know what way we'll fall. but I know a lot of us are mad as hell, as we should be. As such, there exists a current debate as to whether or not the resistance against the current administrative regime should dare to be (gasp) uncivil. Should we use naught words in our criticism? Should we dare to stand up and stand in the way of our political foes? And the Miriam Black that lives in my heart says that fuck yeah, we should. Fuck the fucking fuckers. Fuck the fucking lot of them, and fuck them is they think they can shame us for our incivility while trying to bring the hammer of sexism and racism and ableism down on our democracy. Fuck that noise. Evil people want you to be nice, because when you're nice, it's nearly impossible to point out the evil that they're doing. Fuck nice. Be more like Miriam. Speak truth to power, with as many nasty words as you can muster.

Thank you, you foul-mouthed, venom-hearted souls, you. Keep on keeping on.

Miriam would thank you, but she's too busy giving everyone the middle finger."
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At this point you either love Miriam or you love to hate Miriam. It's a great conclusion, although I worried a bit near the end, Chuck stuck the landing. ( )