I am a big fan of Kelley Armstrong's Women of the Otherworld series. Armstrong generally writes of strong women with supernatural abilities who must hide their secrets to keep family and friends safe. Living with the Dead (Women of the Otherworld, Book 9) continues this theme but with a few important differences. Robyn, a main character, is not a supernatural and knows nothing about the supernatural world. Finn, the detective assigned to the murder cases, actually is a supernatural but doesn't know there is a community for those like him. Hope, a half-demon, and Karl, a werewolf, must try to save Robyn from the supernatural murderer without letting her in on what is really happening.

While I enjoyed Living with the Dead (Women of the Otherworld, Book 9) it was not my favorite of this series by far. It was good but not fantastic. Armstrong uses very short chapters to focus the action on different characters at different times, which is a great technique for keeping the reader a bit off balance and feeling the chaos that both Robyn and Hope are experiencing. However, it can also make for a bit of a choppy read at times. I did actually like Hope's character more in this story than I did in the last book which featured her, Personal Demon (Women of the Otherworld, Book 8).

I also don't feel that the title or the tag line "For a woman on the run from a supernatural killer, it's the one thing even more dangerous than dying... Living With The Dead" fit the story very well. It is actually the detective who sees and talks to ghosts and, after the first couple bodies, Robyn actually copes very well with the fact that people are dying as the killer tries to reach her. ( )

Robyn does PR for Portia a Paris Hilton wannabe. When Portia is killed and Robyn flees the scene, Robyn becomes a logical suspect. Robyn is being chased, not only by the police, but also by the killer, who has extra skills on her side... Luckily Robyn has her own special friends too, she just doesn't know it. So Hope and Karl ( the half demon and werewolf from previous books) come to help Robyn solve the case.

I don't love every Kelley Armstrong book equally. I found this one enjoyable but not a keeper in the way Bitten was. I guess having just read Psycop, having a homicide detective here who was not as fascinating as Victor Bayne (from Psycop) made John Findley, the cop here, pale in comparison. I always like Karl but find Hope a harder character to deal with and, without spoliting things totally, I found the end of the battle confusing and strangely anticlimactic, after the foreshadowing re Hope. ( )

Living with the Dead is a great addition to the Women of the Underworld series but Hope and Karl aren't my favorite characters. A commune/cult of Romany clairvoyants was an interesting turn that left me feeling a little lost. The plot itself, a non-supernatural woman unknowingly caught up in the hidden world of supernaturals was well done and Robyn was written very convincingly. She responded to situations the way I would and the way a lot of people I think would when confronted with a scary reality previously unknown to her. The introduction of a necromancer police officer has a lot of potential and I very much look forward to where Armstrong takes the character. It wasn't my favorite book in the series but it was a very good, entertaining read. ( )

This is a good solid read. A friend of Hope's husband died a few months ago, and they've gone to LA to see her. Various levels of chaos ensue - some of them of Hope's making of course, but some of them from outside sources.

This book, like the previous one in this family, switches viewpoints a lot. Sometimes that's good, and sometimes it interrupts the narrative to my mind, but largely it works well.

My problem is that I don't really, always, believe the protagonist. There are moments when I do, moments when I can if I make the effort and moments where I go "WTF are you doing that for?" and that drags it down a bit - even if later on there's an explanation that makes it somewhat more plausible.

There's also the fact that there was obviously a gap, the clairvoyants, in the council and this seems to be an effort to introduce them and explain why they're not more visible all in one. And I don't really buy the explanations, sorry.

It won't stop me buying the next book to come along though. ( )

Robyn Peltier is an average human. She has no idea her best friend Hope Adams is half demon or that Hope's boyfriend is a werewolf. Robyn moves to L.A. after the tragic and senseless death of her husband. Hopes takes a temporary assignement in L.A. to help Robyn deal with the loss of Damon and restart her life in L.A. Things are going okay for Robyn, she still seems drawn toward stories of senseless death as she tries to deal with her husband's death. Suddenly her boss is killed and she becomes the prime suspect. Hope had shielded her from the supernatural world, but now she lands right in the middle of a supernatural altercation. Her boss' killer is a clairvoyent mixed up with the Nast Cabal.

One thought I had while reading this book was that it would make a good screen play. The action is constantly moving giving depth to all the characters involved. As a novel though the constantly shifting points of view interrupts the flow of the story and doesn't allow this reader to get pulled into the narrative.

I may be somewhat biased, as Hope has never been one of my favorite characters of Armstrongs. Her demonic powers have never really been clear cut, and Armstrong seems to change and expand them as needed for the story rather than working within a given parameter. Adele the clairvoyent is a wonderfully psychotic antagonist. Armstrong does a good job of giving her actions meaning in her twisted mind. Unfortunately Robyn as plain human is not as well developed in her own right. We get more a sense of Robyn through the ghost of her husband rather than from Robyn herself. I enjoyed the interaction of the pragmatic homicide dective Finn with that of Robyn's husband's ghost. I would have liked to see more of them and not so much focus on some of the other side characters.

In my opinion this is the weakest of Armstrong's Women of the Otherworld series. It suffers from too many points of view, and loses a cohesive narrative in the process. There are unique characters that are introduced, that I wouldn't mind seeing the focus of their own story, but putting them all into one was too much. ( )