Dead Witch Walking

This is the first book in The Hollows series, an urban fantasy series where the various Inderlanders (everything from pixies to vampires) were revealed when they proved immune to a pandemic that wiped out a good chunk of humanity years ago. It’s a first person tale told by Rachel Morgan, a witch who has had her fill of working for the magical cops of Inderland Security.

So, she’s off on her own, or at least she would be if she wasn’t joined by two partners, a pixie named Jenks and her old partner Ivy, a living vampire. Being a magical private investigator is not technically illegal, but her bosses at I.S. aren’t the kind to just shake hands and say goodbye. So, in addition to setting up shop and trying to track down her first case, she’s got her old bosses trying to turn her into a grim warning to anyone else foolish enough to follow in her footsteps.

The world was interesting, and her first case was a reasonably good exploration of it. I liked the characters for the most part, though I found the vampire and pixie to be a little too stereotypical. That is, the vampire was a touch too brooding, and the pixie was annoyingly perky and excitable. The story kept things moving, but I thought it was a slow take-off with too much world-building narrative in the early chapters.

Still, it finished strong and left enough open questions to lure me into the next book. It’s evidently quite a long series now, and a friend of mine is quite happy with the later books. So, I guess I’ll be digging into them soon enough. ( )

Fans of Sookie Stackhouse will definitely enjoy this. It has a lot of the same elements of the "other" becoming exposed to the human race. This dabbles a bit faster in the realm of fairies and weres though.

I liked it. I hated the writing style but most people aren't reading this kind of book for the language so I tried to put that aside. The story was good although I really thought that one of the characters who was acting sketchy would come through with a good twist at the end and he didn't which was weird to me. Maybe that comes later in the series.

The characters are consistent although I kept forgetting what the big deal with tomatoes was and it was annoying to me how Ivy was so moody and I was annoyed about all the rules about vampires. I also didn't really get how witches were different than humans since they went to school to become witches. So...it's just education that makes them different?

Overall a good read for vampire fans, which I'm not really. I like Sookie Stackhouse though mostly because of True Blood. For me I would rather read Sookie but for those who have read all of those already, this is a more urban read.

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I actually rather liked this -- enough that I'm mildly interested in reading more of the series.

Admittedly, I'm not interested in the, "I will go to the bookstore and scour the bookshelves for it," sense. Not even in the, "I will look for this at the library," sense. Okay, I'm not even interested enough to type in her name at the library website and put her books on hold.

But! If I found a book of hers while browsing through a second-hand bookstore, I'd probably buy it. More than that, I might buy a few of them -- if it they were a good price, or there was a sale going on.

The plot was good, the premise of her world was intriguing and mildly amusing, and the only flaw was that her writing felt . . . rough. Like this was her first book, but I got the impression from the blurb that it wasn't.

It's just not immersive, magical writing, is all. I kept surfacing from the story and thinking to myself, "Wait, that doesn't make sense . . . " then flipping back a couple pages to double-check stuff. And my attention would start drifting (which is odd, when books have always been the only thing to completely focus me), then snap back when a bright gem of a sentence or paragraph surfaced. She has moments of illustrative, beautiful writing . . . but it's all interspersed with chunky, boring stuff.

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I wanted to like this book, but I was left disappointed. It's a wonderfully imaginative world the author creates, but it takes a long time to get into it and while she describes it well enough for the reader to understand, I tired of it quickly. I'll admit, I was under the impression that a hot vampire or demon would come out of the woodwork, but I didn't find any of that in the book either.

Overall, not great, but good. ( )