“She kept count of her kills.  God I fucking loved her.”  – Dutch Mathew on Juma Landry, Juma.

This second volume in Madhuri Pavamani’s The Keeper series is a beautifully-written yet rather hard to grasp story that continues to follow Juma and Dutch’s star-crossed relationship as the two lovers deal with the ramifications of the romance they embarked upon in the previous book, Dutch.  There are likely to be spoilers for that book in this review.

Juma Landry was an ordinary child until one day, aged just five, she was shot in the throat.  As she lay dying on a hospital gurney, Death came to her and offered her a deal – if Juma chooses to become a Poocha – one of her chosen few special representatives on earth – her time on earth will be extended, and she will live nine lives before dying. Juma’s job as a Poocha, and head of the Alighters, is to intercede, to bring those who have died untimely deaths back to life and give them a second chance (and during the day she blogs about romance novels, though that doesn’t come up much).  For years, Juma belongs only to her job and to Death body and soul – until she falls in love with Dutch, her polar opposite.

Dutch Mathew is the Best at What He Does, which is being a Keeper of the Gate.  Keepers are tasked with hunting down Poochas and therefore with maintaining the balance between death and life.  At least that’s how it worked until Dutch’s brutal father Kahn became head of The Gate because now, Dutch yearns to remove every last Poocha from existence. Dutch was assigned to kill Juma but fell in love with her instead.

As we enter the new book, Juma has chosen between Dutch and the post-death resurrection of her mother, and Dutch has made a deal with his father to do his bidding in exchange for Juma’s safety.   As Juma shepherds her mother’s soul and tries to forget Dutch, Dutch mourns his choices and deals with political machinations at The Gate, including his wicked sister’s attempt at leading an insurrection, and an arranged marriage to Sevyn, a fellow Keeper.

‘Operatic’  is probably the best word to describe Juma.  Bloody, passionate and erotic, it’s not for the weak of palate nor the faint of heart. It’s fitting that Ms. Pavamani opens the book with a dedication to the confident pop singer Rihanna, for it’s a declaration that well matches the narrative intensity and pace of the novel.  Both the singer and the book are unapologetically passionate.

The tenor of Juma overall is poetic and rambling and lyrical, and it’s easy to sink deeply into its bloody, sex-glossed drama. A bombastic brio that has a dark side, this is the kind of novel where the characters are fundamentally quite interesting; I enjoyed Juma’s strength, her toughness and the way her opinionated and smart existence is counterbalanced with her push-pull relationship with Death. I liked that she’s a nuanced person and has a life outside of her relationship with Dutch – though I’d call their connection much more like something close to sexual obsession.  Dutch is harder to like; he’s just as vicious as Juma but has the added feature of being a bit controlling and a bit whiny when Juma wants to control her own destiny and yes, he has the requisite tortured past behind him. His redeeming points mostly involve his praise and worship of Juma, but even that tends to go sideways. Some of the notes of development are very interesting – Juma’s love/hate relationship with Death, the love triangle between the two of them and Dutch, and the way Juma and Dutch counterbalance each other – than others, like Juma’s childish rivalry with Death’s Khat (secretary), Marina and Dutch’s instantaneously over-the-top hatred of the woman he’s arranged to marry. None of the other characters make a very strong impression except for Veda, Dutch’s psychotic sister, and Juma’s wonderful mother.

Plotwise, there are massive logic holes to be found  – if Death wants certain people to come back to life, why does she bother killing them in the first place?  Is she not in control of, well, death itself?  Shouldn’t the Keepers and Death actually be working in tandem to make sure the right people end up dying and the ones who’re supposed to live get to live? Do Keepers not have souls too?  Where do they go when they die?  We hear of Juma’s amazing powers at resurrecting others but mainly she acts as a supercharged warrior. We also get a three-way between Juma and two soccer players she’s picked up ib order to forget about Dutch before we learn anything about how The Gate operate, so don’t look to the book to linger long when it comes to worldbuilding.  Random characters are introduced and then killed to up the blood quotient, and there are long, drawn-out descriptions of the abuse that Dutch suffered as a child, and Dutch and his friend Avery refer to each other ‘fondly’ through use of racial epithets.  You could perform a drinking game to the tune of Dutch calling his sister the c-word.

But Juma’s worst problem is that it suffers from being the second volume in the series, meaning that  most of the romantic development between Juma and Dutch occurred in the previous book.  New readers will miss out on the emotional heft that occurred there, and the plot will only make partial sense to newbies. In fact, I had to do a great deal of glancing back at the Wiki summary for Dutch to understand a bit more about what a Poocha was and the limits of Juma’s powers. The author provides a glossary and tries to explain the basics of the world in-prose, but the novel definitely feels incomplete as a stand-alone. Even worse, the conclusion of the volume is dramatically satisfying but emotionally unsatisfying – classic sequel-bait –  that all but orders the reader to pick up the next volume.  Juma is beautiful, Juma is hard to put down, but it’s a story that only those willing to make a time commitment to a full series will likely enjoy.