Donny's Inferno

Gr 4–6—Twelve-year-old Donny is having a seriously bad day; he has discovered that his father is a hit man, decides to run away from home but becomes trapped in a burning building, and is rescued by Angela, an archdemon from hell…where he now works and lives. One hundred years earlier, Lucifer disappeared from the underworld, leaving the demons, imps, and other residents to run the daily operations. Angela is part of the Great Reform, a group that believes that the souls of the underworld should no longer be tormented in the "Pit of Fire" for eternity but should be dispatched to the "Caverns of Woe" to relive the emotional anguish they caused while living. The Great Reform has created two warring factions with different ideologies on the treatment of these souls, and these factions are tearing the underworld apart. In the beginning of the book, Donny feels like a secondary character who is rarely part of the action; he is constantly being given tours on the operation of the underworld and waiting for Angela to come home to move the story line forward. The plot is slow moving, and much of the beginning is spent on world-building. In the middle, the action picks up substantially with Donny capturing an escaped demon, solving a riddle that saves the lives of many, and capturing the bad guy.