2.5 stars would be more accurate. ( )

One Grave at a Time by Jeaniene Frost
Night Huntress series #6. Paranormal romance / urban fantasy. Best read in series order.
A witch hunter comes alive each All Hallows Eve and kills innocent women. Cat, with her ghost abilities still intact, hunts the killer down for a more permanent death this time. But alive, his skills and strength may be more than Cat and Bones can handle.

Haunting and compelling. Cat is definitely looking out for the underdog but there is always evil to contend with. Friends are the best supporters and many show up to help in this story.
It’s a great addition to the series with this a bit more of an urban fantasy feel. ( )

3.5 stars

Decent Cat and Bones adventure, but the attacks from the ghost got repetitive after a while. It was fun to have so much of Charles and Denise in this one, and Tyler was a fun new character. It left some loose ends with Cat and Bones, but it looks like the next books in the series are Vlad’s. I hope they’re good! ( )

Good fun fluff. ( )

boy, is this hard.
i usually don't have doubts when it comes to rating books, and the quality of the Night Huntress saga is still pretty high even after six books, two spin-offs and at least four novellas. yet i found myself torn between two or three stars, for probably the first time since I've started reading the series.
book 5 was disappointing, but it still had some good moments: the sex chapter, cat's development, cat and bones's romance. what annoyed me about the previous book was the plot, which felt scattered and chaotic, and the writing, which was... ugh. just terrible.
reading this book was like seeing a shimmering surface of a golden city only to find out that deep down it's dark and empty and ugly. bones and cat and all the other characters were there, but, with the only exception of cat, it was like they were merely there as some useless background. ian said a few hilarious lines and then basically vanished; denise and spade didn't add anything to the plot, and their presence is frankly annoying; the premises for a good development for justina were set and left there to be covered with dust; bones is there, yes, but even if he hadn't it wouldn't have made a difference. the protagonist was cat - which is fair, since i love her and she actually /is/ the main character, but it was also annoying, as if the author didn't know what to do with the other characters and just awkwardly left them there.
i've always appreciated frost's style: it's simple and quirky and sharp and funny; but it seems like she didn't write this. the dialogues are poor, most of the drescriptions are awkward, most of the time she forgets some characters are there and the scene sounds incomplete, the banter is gone; it felt like her again only in the last two or three chapters.
the plot was messy and insulting: it simply isn't beliavable that no one understood obvious things until it was too late. it was clear that kramer had picked cat as his third victim, why didn't anyone understand it until almost the end of the book? did the author think the readers are really so dumb? why didn't it occur to anyone that it was weird that kramer, a sexist probably homophobic bitch, picked a man as his accomplice, especially after knowing that he raped them? why did it take cat and bones so long to understand that ghosts were still using marie lauveau's powers to get to her? really, all the plot twists were predictable and fell flat. it almost seems that she made the characters stupid on purpose just to add a few more chapters.
the plot wasn't that good either. it could have been so good, so interesting, and yet it's clear that she didn't really know what to write next, and added things as soon as she thought them. the book was repetitive and boring, so slow-paced that it took me a few days to finish it: the characters are continuously dragged in new places --> attack of the ghost -----> some new place -----> somebody interrupts -----> they have to run again. also, the villain and the story could gave been a lot scarier. i felt some tension only during the end of the book, and the ghost looked somehow... harmless. i mean, sure, he's sleazy and slimy and devious, but hello? he's probably the most powerful ghost in existence? why doesn't he do something actually dangerous, something that could actually hurt? yeah, he throws some silver knives and ruins some apartments and the accomplice almost kills denise, but that's just it. not that much scary. oh, and don't make me start on that finale. so anti-climatic and stupid.
madigan is going to be the great villain in the last instalment of the series, but he doesn't stand as extremely dangerous either? he's stereotypical and caricatural to actually feel realistic, but i hope i'll change my mind about him reading the last book. ( )