This book is an urban fantasy story written by Scott Colby and published by Outland Entertainment. The main character, Kevin Felton, has moved back home after a few life hiccups involving losing a job and a girlfriend. Being back home is always a comforting thing. Familiarity of surroundings. Comfort food at home. Childhood friends that had been left behind and are still there.

But shortly after getting back home, the facade of Harksburg slips. It looks like the place he grew up, but something isn’t right. And that comes to the forefront when at a party two of Kevin’s high school friends appear to have an accident. Both of them die. But moments later they get back up. It seems Death is taking a bit of a break from his duties.

Is that a thing? Kevin finds out that not only is it a thing, but it’s kinda his fault. Death is depressed. His girlfriend left him. And she left him for Kevin, even though Kevin thinks she is just a wet dream fantasy he’s indulged in since high school. She is a water nymph after all.

Kevin is introduced to an Elf named Driff. And his eyes are opened to a world just beneath the surface of his home town. Pulling the veil back and finding out the grumpy Vietnam vet next door is actually a pixie. But the biggest shock to his system is that he is being enlisted to “fix” death. Get him back to doing his job before people notice that dying isn’t a thing in Harksburg.

This is actually a fairly light hearted story. I know what you’re saying. But Death is the main plot point here. How can it be light hearted? Scott does a good job here keeping things that way with his writing style. It’s an easy read and an engaging one. Even if at times things were playing out in an expected way.

As a writer and an editor, there were a few moments where the editor failed here (A note here: This book was published prior to the current printing with Outland, so the editing is not related to Outland.) For most people, these won’t even be noticed. I can’t help but see them. It wasn’t a tremendous amount of them, and nothing compared to the Richard Kadrey book I reviewed back at Horror-Web. In that circumstance I had gotten an ARC (Advanced Reader Copy), which is by definition “not the final version.” But this particular book had an error literally on every other page. In that case, I actually did knock it significantly because it made the book hard to read. A Date With Death is nowhere near that. And like I said, odds are you will read this and not notice any of them.