Harper Blaine is the stereotypical hard-boiled detective, and in the opening chapter of the first book Greywalker she is viciously assaulted by someone she's been investigating and is clinically dead for about seven minutes. When she recovers, nothing is the same. She sees things that aren't there, she's propelled into some sort of misty, dark otherwhere, she's seeing the things that go bump in the night. In effect, that misty borderland between the natural and the supernatural is called the Grey and she now has a permanent passport to travel there. There's no going back to regular life.

All of these stories are essentially fast-paced action movies on paper. While all of the characters are distinctive, all are without depth, including the protagonist herself. This isn't really a series about personal growth, simply the growth of supernatural superpowers. Which is a shame, because so many of these characters have potential. And the romantic subplots--are there to add the mandatory sprinkling of spice, not depth.

Poltergeist deals with just that, but it is apparently created as part of a university experiment. This is where we meet apparently Harper's only friend from before her accident and new life: Phoebe Mason, a bookstore owner whose family immigrated from Jamaica. I think the main reason for creating a black friend was to bring in the Caribbean version of the poltergeist--the duppy. It's nice that Kat Richardson isn't relying solely on European legends for her material. The final showdown takes place in Chinatown, so more local history and cultural diversity to the story. The romance is limping along through long-distance phone calls with Europe, since Will took a job with Sotheby's in London.

So what do I like about the stories? She does her homework and does a good job with the scenery and exposition to give readers a feel for the locales. She has a fair sprinkling of different cultures and racial groups--detective Solis is a Colombian by birth, then there's the Jamaican Mason family, the various Native Americans who show up in Underground. Harper owns a ferret. She does a great job portraying ferrets as pets, and it is certainly a nice change from all of the cat owners in mysteries.

What don't I like? The characters are shuffled in and out of stories with no real pacing or development, just sudden left turns and departures. Each story is entirely crisis management, there's no sense that Harper has anything approaching a normal routine, even if the normal has been redefined. Never any visits with friends or plans for a restful weekend or calls from annoying relatives. So the characters are essentially cardboard cutouts that are moved around the board as needed without any sort of convincing motivation or sense of inevitability.

And most commonly, Harper's reactions to the Grey and to vampires and to whatever else is nausea. But boy, she keeps trooping right along with the nausea and other physical discomforts. As someone who's gone through chemotherapy, it's kind of disturbing to have nausea tossed in there as the most common physical symptom Harper contends with, and yet she just shrugs it off. Shit, there's whole suites of pharmaceuticals and endless brochures and books of advice for how to cope with nausea, which can be quite debilitating, and continue to get vital nutrients and survive. I don't think the author has any grasp of it, really, and every time I read about the nausea in the story it makes my guts twinge.

Similarly, her interactions with the vampires. She has profound physical reactions to them, admits they scare the pants off her, but then she just blithely handles them. Once again, doesn't convince me. And as a friend pointed out, they have such prosaic names: Edward, Carlos, Alice, Gwen, and so on.

So if you want quick entertainment that will occupy you for a few hours, with characters you aren't really going to become attached to, this is the series. It's kinda like the John Grisham of urban fantasy. Kat Richardson is certainly better than some others I've read in this style. I'm not going to go out and buy any of these books though, and I'm returning the ones I borrowed. ( )

http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2008-0... ( )

Slightly more interesting than book one, but the Harper character still disappoints. I just can't believe in Harper's unwillingness to learn more about the Grey--she is an investigator, for goodness sake, yet she displays very little curiosity about phenomena she is fated to live through. I also don't understand why this obviously assertive woman would meekly accept whatever conditions her client sets. And then there is the boyfriend that she cannot bring herself to confide in (she doesn't even try, preferring instead to repeatedly p*** him off). The university events aren't believable either--this study would never get IRB approval, let alone grant money (perhaps most readers wouldn't mind that, but I did). This book gets very close to being an "idiot" plot, where the plot wouldn't happen if the protagonist didn't behave like an idiot. Quinton is the most interesting character yet we see very little of him. At least Harper has a cell phone now and not that anachronistic pager. I don't think I'll be reading any more of this series--too many other books on my "to read" list. ( )

I had to push myself through this books, I don't know why, I just didn't enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the first. I was slightly distracted. However I still feel that Harper's story is one worth reading and I love the charachter development. ( )

In Poltergeist, we find out Blaine is still resistant to learning and practicing her powers. For example, she’ll look at a person’s aura to get more information about them but she’s not sure what the colors actually mean. As the only known Greywalker there isn’t a Greywalking for Dummies book to consult. A professor at the local university has put together an experiment to see if a poltergeist can be created. The results have recently gotten stronger and the professor thinks someone in the group is trying to manipulate the results. He hires Blaine to investigate. Before long one of the experiment participants ends up dead. Was it the poltergeist or someone else who committed the murder? Blaine tries to complete her case without getting caught in the middle of the police investigation of the murder. The same cast of secondary characters appears in this book and a few new ones are introduced.

See full review at http://www.amberstults.com/?p=327 ( )