Ever read a book and find yourself thinking, "This is pretty good, but it could have been face-melting awesome."? This is one of those books for me. I really liked it, but found myself picking some serious nits while reading it. 
 Stark was a magician (a real magician, not a sawing-a-woman-in-half kind) who was madly in love with his girlfriend Alice when he was betrayed by another magician named Mason and some others. Mason managed to send Stark to hell, but as a living person, not a dead soul. 
 11 years later, Stark learns that Alice has been murdered on Earth by Mason and his pals. Determined to get revenge, Stark breaks out of hell with a magical key that allows him to access almost any point in any dimension. His stay in hell has made him supernaturally tough with an extremely bad attitude, but he soon runs across various angels, demons, monsters, alchemists, magicians, Nazi skin-heads and porn shop owners that he has to deal with as he learns that there may be something much bigger than his revenge at stake. 
 This had a great concept with a lot of original ideas and some terrific action. Mixing magic with various weapons, including shotguns, makes for some awesome carnage when thing really get rolling. 
 However, for the first 250 pages or so, Stark just comes across as an unlikeable asshole who blunders about warning his enemies he's back and generally getting his ass kicked. (I've noticed a common factor among supernatural characters like Harry Dresden or Joe Pitt that three-quarters of the books seem to consist of them getting beaten to a pulp by various beasties and this book continues that trend.) The first half of this book consists mainly of Stark complaining about all the clothes he's ruined by getting repeatedly abused. 
 The author has a bad habit of having Stark do stupid things, that he acknowledges as stupid, just to advance the plot and it's just chalked up to him being 'impulsive'. Plus, there are some serious logic gaps. Stark can access any point in any dimesion with his supernatural key. Yet, he seems to prefer stealing cars. And when he needs to dispose of a body, he steals yet another car and thinks about how many chances he's taking as he drops the body in the La Brea tar pits. Why wouldn't he just use the key and take the body to Antartica or the middle of the Amazon and just dump it? It doesn't help that he uses the key about 5 seconds after dumping the body. 
 However, the ending redeemed this book a lot. When the action finally starts, it gets massive in scale and imaginative in how weapons and magic could be blended. Stark become a bad-ass anti-hero instead of a whining jerk, and the ending sets up a lot of possibilities. I hope future ones are more like the second half of the book and less like the first half. 
 Oh, and for you Donald Westlake fans, the main character's name is Stark and one of the bad guys is named Parker. Get it?