Greywalker

Greywalker
Kay Richardson, 2006

Premise: Harper is a PI with a fairly average life, until a violent attack leaves her briefly, well, dead. Her experience leaves her with lingering symptoms: she sees and feels things that don't seem to be there.

Oof. this is slightly awkward. Greywalker has been on my to-read list for a while now. The series was highly recommended by a friend, and the author is local to my new home. I picked up a cheap copy months ago, and it was the first one to hand when I decided I should actually start reading the books I bought over the last year.

Unfortunately, it didn't really click for me. It wasn't one thing, just a series of little hiccups. It came out in 2006, and it feels modern except that characters keep talking about pagers. Pagers. All the time pagers, and going to the office to check messages. The word just dates it in a particularly awkward way.

As a lifelong fantasy/SF fan, an author has to work much harder to get me to sympathize with a character who gets crazy powers and refuses to learn to control them. That's like crazy powers 101, and Harper's reluctant spook thing never really felt right to me.

Plus she likes ferrets. Smelly little tube rats.

It isn't a badly constructed paranormal piece, much of the description was good, although I also had issues with the pace.

Again, it isn't that there was anything about this book that was really bad, just... It made me think about the episode of Grimm that I watched for Mainlining Christmas this year. This could be seen as the literature equivalent. There are a lot of books and series similar to this one, and to my eye, the differences are slight, and either this particular set of characters and powers and quirks clicks for you or it doesn't. If it doesn't one that's only very slightly different might, and that’s all down to very personal taste.

2 Stars - An Okay Book