Tag: Richardson, Kat

“Labyrinth” Kat Richardson

“Labyrinth” is book 5 of Kat Richardson’s Greywalker series, and I read it a couple of months ago now. I nearly decided not to write a blog post about it as it had been so long since I read it – this summer has been pretty hectic & I’ve been generating posts to write quicker than I can write them! (Which is a nice problem to have 🙂 ). But I do want to make a few remarks for my own benefit even if I’m not sure how interesting or coherent they’ll be for anyone else. And it’s incredibly hard to say anything without spoilers for the previous books.

I thought when I started the series that these would be a never ending series of PI thrillers. That book 1 would be the origin story where Harper Blaine gets her ability to see and interact with the supernatural and then there’d be a bad-guy-of-the-book or mystery-of-the-book for each succeeding instalment. Instead it’s become clear that there’s an overarching story here, and I found out (after I read this book but before I wrote about it) that the ninth and final book has been published this summer. So that’s reshaped how I think about the series a bit, and I think probably gives them more re-read value (and I’m annoyed now that I missed out on book 3 as it’s more like missing a chapter of a novel rather than just an episode). I think I’ll stick to using the library for now – but I should put them on the list to be bought & revisited later.

Plot wise, Harper is back on home ground here and we revisit some of the people and plot threads from book 1 but now Harper knows so much more than she did. It’s become clear that what happened to Harper wasn’t an accident, and that a lot of the people that seemed coincidentally linked to her in the first story actually had agendas of their own. Harper is also being changed by her increasingly deep connection to the Grey, and not in good ways. Over the last 4 books she’s gradually opened up and made more friends & connections* and now the Grey is starting to take some of that away. I don’t think this is going to turn out to be a tragedy overall, the tone so far hasn’t felt like the sort of story where Harper could become evil and take over the world muahahahaha. But with 4 books left there’s definitely time for these disturbing seeds to grow and it to get darker before pulling back at the end.

*Amusing that her lack of connection to the world around her was something I was concerned was a bad sign for the series in book 1. Nope, it was a plot point.

On a different note, after I read book 4 I wondered if the Egyptian vampires were a real legend – the author’s note in this book says that they are not. I’m impressed that Richardson has made her creation feel so truthy – there wasn’t anything that jumped out and made me think that couldn’t be an Egyptian legend.

Hopefully the library has book 6! 🙂

“Vanished” Kat Richardson

Vanished is the fourth book in Kat Richardson’s Greywalker series – I’m getting these out of the library so sadly I skipped over book 3 because the library don’t have it. I don’t think this’ll be a long post – I’m not sure how much I can say about this book while staying spoiler free. When I started reading the series I thought they were going to be very episodic monster-of-the-week stuff, but this one (and perhaps the last one too, I don’t know) is much more concerned with series arc. And my initial criticism of the protagonist, Harper Blaine, feeling in the first book like she came out of nowhere is even more off base than I thought with the last book! Here we get to meet some of her family, and other figures from her past, and we find out both why she’s kinda bad at interpersonal relationships and something about why she’s a Greywalker.

I like that Richardson is pulling in things other than the typical urban fantasy critters. The main focus is the ghosts rather than the vampires, and there are other beings from other mythologies – notably a golem, and a statue of Sekhmet which the goddess speaks through at least once. You can probably guess I was pleased to read that bit, I do have a fondness for Sekhmet – and I think Richardson got the right feel for a goddess who is both a protective deity and a personification of rage. She also works in some Ancient Egyptian vampires – not sure here if she took some known piece of Egyptian mythology and reworked it or if it was an invention of her own. What I liked was that they were both vampires and yet a bit different – having cultural and mythological variety in even the creatures that are well worn tropes of urban fantasy makes the whole world feel more fleshed out and solid.

Time to see if the library has book 5, I think 🙂

“Poltergeist” Kat Richardson

This is the second of Kat Richardson’s urban fantasy/detective series about a Seattle-based PI who sees ghosts & can walk in the ghost world (I read the first one a couple of months ago). The set up for this book is that a psychologist is researching how people react to the idea that they are interacting with the paranormal – he’s set up an experiment where a group think they’ve generated a poltergeist, but he’s got someone faking the ghostly actions. Only now he’s getting things happening that his faker hasn’t faked – so he asks Harper Blaine to investigate & find out which of the group is faking the new stuff. Obviously, given the genre of the book the poltergeist is in fact real and significantly more dangerous than the psychologist comprehends – and Harper must figure out how to get rid of it without letting on that it’s real, and what caused it.

My specific criticism of Greywalker – that Harper appears to’ve appeared fully formed from nowhere is addressed. In this book there’s more of a sense of roots in the city pre-dating her becoming a greywalker, in particular her friend Phoebe & Phoebe’s family. There’s also another improvement that Richardson actually mentions in her afterword – in book 1 Harper didn’t have a mobile phone instead she just has a pager, which felt rather odd and made me wonder if the book wasn’t as recent as I thought. It turns out that the first book was written several years before it was published, and Richardson decided not to entirely update it to the “present day” of the publication date. This second book has Harper get a phone and even lampshades it by having her dislike how it lets people call her too early in the morning.

I still like how the series is tending towards the horror side of the supernatural beasties – this poltergeist is dangerous, and the vampire necromancer that Harper needs help from to deal with it has his own less-than-human perspective on appropriate punishments for the mind that is linked to the poltergeist. I also like how Harper has to hide what she is otherwise people would think she was crazy – it’s like our world, the default is that ghosts and vampires don’t exist. It’s just that in this case Harper and a very few others know that’s not true. But her understandable desire to not be seen as crazy is probably making her miss out on potential allies, I suspect as the series goes on she’ll let more people into the truth of her world – there are various things in this book that made me think that Harper’s need to keep herself to herself is being framed as something she needs to move beyond.

I think this still falls into the fun-read-once category – so I’ll carry on getting these from the library. Sadly the library don’t have the third book, but I’ve reserved the fourth one instead.

“Greywalker” Kat Richardson

This book opens with the protagonist, Harper Blaine, being beaten to death. Quite literally. She’s actually only technically dead for about 2 minutes, due to the wonders of modern medicine, but the experience hasn’t left her unchanged. She’s now a Greywalker, and sees ghosts & can venture into the in between world where they exist. That’s a … state of being, rather than a profession – her profession remains the same, she’s a private investigator. And new cases come in – a missing person case, a missing heirloom to track down. Only her change of state hasn’t gone unnoticed & there’s more of the paranormal around in Seattle than she’d realised before she died & came back.

I liked this – having read far too much urban fantasy a few years ago I burnt out on the formula that so many seem to follow but while this book ticks many of the requisite boxes I think it does something more interesting with them than just follow along formulaicly. Yes, the protagonist is a tough young woman – but she’s tough in a “is a good PI” sort of way, not in a “can kick supernatural ass and make sarcastic quips” sort of way. Yes, there’s a love interest, but that didn’t quite go where I was expecting. Yes, there are the normal collection of supernatural beasties – vampires for sure, werewolves probably, a necromancer or two, ghosts of course – but they tip to the horror side of the spectrum rather than the fantasy side in my opinion. Blaine’s reactions to her new status feel real, too, and grounded in her job & personality. And not everybody she meets is supernatural – some of the people are still just people, some dodgy goings are just straightforward crimes.

My criticism is that Blaine appears to’ve come from nowhere despite feeling real. It’s been a couple of weeks since I read this, so perhaps I’ve forgotten if there’s an explanation for why she doesn’t seem to have friends that aren’t connected to this new world. There’s a business associate or two, but there doesn’t seem more than that, and yet she connects to people easily – there’s not a feeling of a “traumatic past that means she doesn’t deal well with people”. But I feel awkward writing this, coz maybe I’m an idiot who has forgotten something in just two weeks. Or maybe for all the solid feelingness of the world building it doesn’t have enough past. It’s a problem that cures itself, of course, because over the series (yes, it ticks the ongoing series box too) these’ll be the past friends for the new books.

So, yes, I liked this but I think it’s in the fun-read-once category. Still, I liked it enough to reserve the next one at the library.