Product Description

Being one of the Earth's protectors is never easy, but when Claire the Keeper and Austin the cat find themselves in charge of the Elysian Fields Guesthouse Bed and Breakfast, all Hell breaks loose in the form of a gateway residing in the basement! Do not miss the latest from one of the top writers in the fantasy genre!
Compares to best-selling fantasy authors Mercedes lackey and Charles deLint Tanya Huff's DAW books were chosen by the New York Public Library system as part of their Books for Teens program!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63803 in Books
• Published on: 1998-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From Amazon.com
Ever notice that the boundary between the supernatural and mundane worlds is very thin in eastern Canada? Tanya Huff made Toronto a vampire territory and hotbed of evil eruptions (Blood Price, Blood Trail, Blood Lines, Blood Pact, Blood Debt). Now she moves to Kingston, Ontario, for Summon the Keeper.

Claire Hansen, the Keeper, is summoned to the Elysian Fields Guest House to reseal a hole in the basement, which is literally an opening to Hell. The owner and monitor of the site disappears, leaving Claire stuck managing the place until the problem is solved. Her new employee, Dean McIssac, is a gorgeous Newfie who cooks, cleans, and lives the Boy Scout oath. Then there's Jacques Labaet: very French Canadian, very sexy, very dead. Jacques is a ghost who wants to be the man in Claire's life. Oh yeah, and there's Austin, a talking cat with attitude: "I barely know you, but I'm assuming you're human. I'm not saying this is a good thing, it's just the way it is."

Huff keeps the plot moving and the quips coming to the very end. Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series will find this novel light but refreshing. --Nona Vero

Ingram
Being one of Earth's protectors is never easy, but when Claire the Keeper andAustin the cat find themselves in charge of the Elysian Fields Guesthouse Bedand Breakfast, all Hell breaks loose in the form of a gateway residing in thebasement! .

Customer Reviews

Light, Festive Fantasy
This isn't a Cat Book.

I think cats are fine, but I'm a dog person (you really have to be one or the other, it's like politics) and was wary of Ms Huff's opus due to both the large cat on the cover, and large blurb on the back featuring the cat. But, I repeat, it isn't a cat book (I guess they thought that was their marketing hook).

This is a fun, frothy fantasy, very light in tone (despite the presence of Hell in the basement), somewhat akin to Piers Anthony in his more tolerable incarnations. It's angst-free urban fantasy--the plot is essentially episodic, as new interesting guests arrive at the hotel--and one can imagine it being a Warner Brothers TV hit, a neat cross between Faulty Towers and Bewitched, without becoming too "twee."

If you want something a little more psychological dense, or consciously literate, Charles de Lint may be more your style. But if you're in the mood to be playful, give Huff a chance to win you over.

Note: a 3 star ranking from me means a pleasant enough read; 4 stars indicate a very enjoyable work; but I'll only give 5 stars to books that are or ought to be classic; sadly, most books published seem to warrant 2 or less ... I try not to read those.

If you read one...you'll have to buy the series
Ok, I'm going to write a short summary of this book...but there is one thing you need to know BEFORE you read the summary: this is one of the funnier books I have read in years. Keep that in mind...Claire is a Keeper, one of the few of the lineage strong enough to help maintain the balance of good and evil in the world. She follows Summonses to "accident sites" and then she uses her powers to repair the sites. She follows a Summons to the Elysian Fields Guest House and finds it is or rather was run by a Cousin, a less powerful person of the lineage. The Cousin takes a hike leaving Claire to mind...well...A portal to Hell in the basement, a sleeping corrupted Keeper, and a randy ghost of a sailor. But Keepers are only supposed to be tied to one sight when they get OLD, and Claire is far from that. Throw in one of the most realistic anthropomorphic cats (read sarcastic in the extreme) and one hunky maintenance man and a meddling younger sister (who is too powerful for her own good) and you know all Hell will break lose (sorry). Huff's vampire detective series is great, but these are laugh out loud funny. So far there are three (Second Summoning and Long Hot Summoning follow this) and we can only hope for more. Give em a try...Second Summoning is my favorite (but best to read them in order)

Read this BEFORE you clean the basement....
and you will probably decide to just leave it messy.

Claire Hansen and her cat Austin have sought refuge in the rather seedy Elysian Fields Guest House not because it was late at night, pouring rain and the only place that had both a vacancy and allowed pets (though those were factors) but Claire had been summoned to the site. She is a descendant of Adam and his first wife, Lilith and therefore has a responsibility to help keep good and evil balanced. The Guest House has a portal to Hell in the basement and a 'guest' who has been in a trance in room 6 for decades. On the plus side there's also a charming ghost and a hunky handyman.

Claire's job is to seal the portal so she can move on to the next site but she also has to deal with the various guests who check into the house, (vampires, retired Olympians, werewolves) cope with a nosy neighbor and a weekend with her teenage sister. Added to all this is an ethical question, must a charming man be avoided just because he is too young or too dead?

This is not a serious horror story - this book is seriously funny. It is the first of a series, I can't wait to get to the rest.