Hideyuki Kikuchi: Pilgrimage of the Sacred and the Profane

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Dark Horse Books; 1st DH Press Ed edition (December 22, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-13: 978-1595821065

The Cruel Desert between the Inner and Outer Frontiers has a mind, and a heart, of its own.
Granny Viper is a "people finder," a searcher for lost souls along the roads of the forbidding wasteland of 12,090 A.D. Her latest mission: the safe return to her family of an "abductee," a young woman named Tae, kidnapped eight years ago by vampire Nobility and held in Castle Gradinia on the far border of the Frontiers. Rescuing Tae was only half the battle - Viper knows she can't make the rest of the journey with the girl across the formidable expanse to the town of Barnabas alone. But the wizened crone makes a fatal mistake in hiring the mercenary Bullow Brothers to help her, and when she turns to the legendary Vampire Hunter D for salvation the two women and D find themselves in a race for their lives across the blinding desert sands.
 
Another adventure of D - and I really liked this one, mostly because it took D to an emotional place that we'd never seen him before.
 D walks into a Frontier town, like he do, and takes a job from a lawyer engaged in sweaty orgy. Yeah, it surprised me, too. Unfortunately, there are a couple of those happy gunslingers (who usually don't even possess actual guns) that abound on the Frontier who of course want to challenge him. Then there's the one who wants his help, and she's pretty sassy. And also bi-polar, apparently.
 Anyway, with this rag tag group of crazy kids they start across an extremely dangerous desert that they discover...oops, I can't tell you that. Because that would spoil the surprise. But I will tell you this - it's a bit of a "what?" moment. But on to the emotional stuff. The girl in the charge of Granny (sassy lady) is one of the hidden, italics not mine. In other words, she was kidnapped by the Nobility, has served them for who knows how long, and now Granny is returning her to her family, which is an iffy prospect to say the least. There's another surprise about this girl that D strangely connects to, and he, despite the author telling us how cold he is pretty much constantly, protects her from everyone and everything. Not because he has to, but because he's noble and good, and I love that nobody thinks he is, but he's the freaking best. Sorry, babble city right there, but I really love D.
 There's a lot of that strange sort of honor going around in this volume. Each character starts out seeming like a deceptive asshole, but by the end of the book you actually care about each of them. And you're even...somewhat proud of them. And I think that's a great and interesting quality in a novel that is essentially about an emotionless, badass swordsman. Delightfully unexpected.
 Overall: A
 I think this was one of the better ones, plot and pacing wise, although Kikuchi does have a serious problem with keeping pretty much everything obscure. If his plan is to leave us hanging as long as possible and draw the series out, it's working.