Five SFF books featuring middle-aged and elderly heroes who still kick ass

Sarah Beth Durst is the award-winning author of over twenty fantasy books for kids, teens, and adults, including Spark, Drink Slay Love, and The Queens of Renthia series. She won an American Library Association Alex Award and a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award and has been a finalist for SFWA's Andre Norton Nebula Award three times.

Her new novel is The Bone Maker.

At Tor.com Durst tagged five favorite novels "about older characters who thought the curtain had closed on their show but discovered there was still a whole lot of saving-the-world to be done," including:

Carpe Demon by Julie Kenner

The subtitle of this book is “Confessions of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom,” and it is absolutely everything you’d expect and want from a book with that subtitle. Kate Connor is perfectly happy with her life as a retired demon hunter and is not pleased when she catches a whiff of a demon at the local supermarket while she’s contending with a dirty diaper. She’s even less pleased when the demon barges into her kitchen, intent on killing her, while she has a dinner party to prepare. This book is all about achieving that work-life balancing act (when your work is top secret and highly dangerous), and it’s fabulous. Won me over from the moment she tried to hide a demon body behind the pet food.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue