Greywalker

After I blogged about M.L.N. Hanover’s Jayne Heller books (reviewed here) and Seanan McGuire’s October Daye novels (reviewed here), a few folks in the know suggested that I give Kat Richardson’s Greywalker urban fantasies a try. It was good advice: Richardson beautifully combines noir mystery with psychic craziness in her tales of Harper Blaine.

Blaine is a Seattle private investigator who is attacked in the course of a routine job; she dies from the savage beating she suffers, but her death lasts only two minutes before she is revived. As a result of her momentary death, however, she has gained an ability to see into the Grey – a world that is our own, but not entirely of this earth. The Grey is a place where ghosts live, and show more all times overlap the present. There are hungry creatures in the Grey, too, and Harper’s ignorance of what is going on there threatens to kill her again, this time permanently.

Greywalker, the first of the series, introduces the important series characters with panache. Harper first hires Quinton, a technology whiz who sets her up with a good security system in her office, and soon becomes indispensable for a number of other tasks. Then she meets up with Mara and Ben Danziger, who know a lot more about the Grey than she does, and are willing to teach her what they know. And then, of course, there are the unfriendly neighborhood vampires, and the ghost who lives in the Danziger’s house, and another ghost who hires Harper, and before she really knows what’s going on, she has acquired a new specialty in the paranormal.

Greywalker manages to introduce all these characters while spinning a genuine noir mystery as well. It’s as much a page-turner as any mystery I’ve ever read. Despite the fact that the set-up sounds, well, corny – I would have told you before I read this book that it wouldn’t be my sort of thing at all – Richardson keeps it as noir as a dark alley in 1940’s downtown Seattle. Her own skepticism about the Grey is probably what keeps this from falling into cuteness at any point, not to mention that Harper’s paranormal clients and enemies are genuinely scary. Richardson’s vampires don’t sparkle, and her ghosts have nothing in common with anything out of “Ghostbusters.” This is cold, harsh reality in a grim world that has more wrong with it than we could possibly know – unless we’d died for two minutes and awakened in the Grey.

Poltergeist, the second book in the series, was disappointing after Greywalker’s great start. The set-up is tied much more closely into real events, as a professor in a fictional Seattle university attempts to re-create the Philip project, an experiment actually conducted in the early 1970s by the Toronto Society for Psychical Research in which a group of volunteers attempted to “create” a ghost – to use the power of their combined minds to imagine an entity and then attempt to call him up in conditions similar to those of a séance. The professor gets a lot more than he bargained for, and is convinced that someone is faking psychic phenomena. He calls in Harper to investigate and tell him who his troublemaker is. But Harper finds there is more going on than fakery, and worse: it isn’t long before someone is dead.

Richardson doesn’t seem to a handle on her plot and pacing in Poltergeist, as she did in Greywalker. The story takes a very long time to develop, especially after it becomes clear who the villain of the piece is. I was disappointed that, after a strong debut, Richardson fell into a classic sophomore slump.

Despite my disappointment, though, I’m looking forward to reading the remaining three Greywalker mysteries in print, Underground, Vanished and Labyrinth. Richardson has a solid heroine and a good concept going for her. I’m looking forward to seeing Harper become established and confident in her abilities in navigating the Grey, and am curious as to where Richardson will take her. show less

I’ve been on a roll, reading great paranormal mysteries that are new to me. Greywalker, by Kat Richardson, is a fresh take on that popular genre.

After a near-death experience, private investigator Harper Blaine begins seeing strange things. A strange mist seems to surround her everywhere she goes. She learns that it’s called “The Grey,” and that otherworldly beings reside there. Those beings are attracted to Harper, for some reason. And she soon finds herself talking to (and even working for) ghosts, vampires, and other strange creatures.

While at first I found the descriptives of the Grey confusing, it being another dimension of sorts, I soon realized that was part of the charm of this new series. Richardson has created a unique show more world. While books about vampires are popular right now, Richardson has been able to give the subgenre a different twist.

I started reading this book in the bookstore, and had to buy it then and there. I couldn’t put it down. The story was fresh and exciting. And the characters were all complex and vivid. I was pulled into the story, with its fun twists and turns.

I am much looking forward to the sequel this fall! show less

I've wanted to read the Greywalker books for a decent amount of time now. I received the first one from an exchange a whiles back, and I have the third one as well. My edition of the second one seems to have disappeared sadly, but I sorted that out quickly enough. All that rambling means is that I enjoyed the book quite a lot and can't wait for more.

Harper is...different. She doesn't take things on face value and she can multi-task really well. Her death, because she did truly die for a bit there, opened her up to a whole new level of life that she probably wished stayed hidden, but that she deals with admirably. The 'Grey' is our reality, but not quite. Like The Outer Limits or Twilight Zone, the Grey happens all around us, but for the show more most part no one has any idea about it. And how people are tuned into the Grey differs from person to person, talent to talent. About halfway through the book I was feeling as sick as Harper anytime she slipped through the Grey quite honestly.

The cast of characters surrounding Harper are equally intriguing--from Quinton (freelance troubleshooter) to Will (antiques auctioneer), they manage to balance out Harper's bluntness. The Danzigers--Ben and Mara--were the most interesting to me. They're in similar fields of study, that is of the paranormal, but have entirely different approaches to it. Ben is more about the science of the unexplained, getting to know the grit and details of what makes the Grey work so to speak. Mara is a witch, she's got firsthand experience with the Grey and what it can do if you're not careful. They butt heads on occasion throughout the book, with a culminating heated discussion near the end involving just how differently they view things.

Harper handles 2 primary cases--the disappearance of college kid Cameron and finding a lost heirloom for a mysterious client. At first both seem pretty routine, but as they unfold it becomes obvious that its just as well that Harper is becoming acclimated to the Grey. Her transition isn't easy, she doesn't just accept that suddenly hey ghosts and vampires and witches really exist; she fights it. She fights it until it makes her sick and then keeps trying to fight it some more. She never wanted to be 'special', she was happy with an ordinary life. show less

My first encounter with Kat Richardson was in 2009 in Jim Butcher's "Mean Streets", an anthology of four Urban Fantasy PIs that included Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden, Simon R Green's Nightsider and Thomas E. Sniegoski's Remy Chandler.

Kat Richardson's "The Third Death Of The Little Clay Dog" was by far the best story in the book. Set in Mexico on the Day of the Dead, it was an accomplished short story, full of local colour, mysticism and intrigue, lit up by flashes of humour. It left me wanting to know more about the heroine, Harper Blaine and what it meant to be a Greywalker.

Six years later, I finally followed through and listened to the audiobook of Kat Richardson's "Greywalker", book one in the Greywalker series.

It's a competent, show more well-plotted Urban Fantasy with some new twists on the supernatural and the "Grey" that sits between our daylight world and the world of magic or perhaps death. It suffers a little from an Series One, Episode One feel but there's enough there to make me want to read book two: a diverse cast of characters, so good ideas on the supernatural, well written dialogue and good action scenes.

What I missed, which I remember being present in "The Third Death Of The Little Clay Dog" was a strong sense of who Harper Blaine is. I ended this "Greywalker" feeling that I hadn't yet met the real Harper Blaine. Instead, I'd read her "origins" story.

Still, it was an interesting origins story and I can see that Harper Blaine has lots of potential. show less

Harper is a private investigator. Though that sounds a lot more glamorous than it is for the small time Seattle PI. At least until one of her clients tries to kill her and her injuries do cause her to die – at least for a little while. And when she came back, she could see things she never imagined existed.

Now able to see an experience the Grey, she is faced with a world where ghosts, vampires and witches all demand her attention – and her client list has certainly become both more interesting and much much more frightening. Faced with a vampire coup, a lost vampire child trying to find his way in the world without a mentor, and a mysterious client seeking a haunted artefact; Harper has to investigate in ways she never had before show more – and finds her skills as a detective and a Greywalker in much demand.

Of course, this very much results in her being thrown in at the deep end – and she must learn to swim even while desperately refusing to see the water.

This book was a lot more unique than I imagined – the mystical private detective/cop has, of course been done done and done again – but I’m continually surprised by how much it can be done differently. Harper’s abilities as a Greywalker still remain very much undefined and somewhat ambiguous – at this stage her powers are probably best described as super senses as much as anything else. This makes the mystical much more a focus of Harper’s adaption to the world she’s seeing

And that world is strange indeed. I still have a lot more questions than I have answers and this book has done a great job of introducing a world but not giving too much away – hinting at vast diversity without feeling the need to enumerate every creature and spell. We have vampires and revenants and witches and ghosts all inter-twined in different ways – and even these simple labels rarely encapsulated the full power and variety of each being. We saw at least 3 or 4 vampires that had vastly different abilities and numerous hints to magic and powers for all these forces that point to a lot more to come. To say nothing of the vast and complex nature of the Grey as well. Is it completely unique? No, but there’s a lot of fascinating twists on old concepts here.

While the plot starts slow it quickly interweaves 2-3 mysteries together. I was actually irritated that we had too much going on competing with each other, but then they came together to be connected and feed off one another. It was nicely done, just as I was getting lost and irritated, we then had one storyline fed by all three tributaries. I liked it, I was impressed, it was a great piece of writing.

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I just finished this book the other day, and I have to say that I am HOOKED. You can imagine my glee when I realized that there are several other volumes. Lately I haven't been reading much fantasy, and certainly nothing containing vampires, but this book shattered my preconceptions and had me hooked from the first chapter. The best way I can describe it is "Anita Blake all grown up." Harper Blaine is no Mary Sue, and this novel contained the first two females I've liked in a supernatural-themed book in years. The (rather large) cast is fascinating, varied, and, best of all, realistically flawed. Even with a bevy of secondary male characters, I never once noticed what I like to call "God-syndrome" (where they are all perfect: gorgeous, show more smart, mysterious, and dangerous yet desirable), and, best yet, the majority weren't at all romantically / sexually interested in the heroine! (At least no more than the average male with a penis is attracted to a remotely attractive female). To top it off, the story itself was compelling, intricate, and well-planned with plenty of surprising twists to keep me on my toes without using unrealistic decision-making or forced coincidences to keep the story from following obvious or cliché plot twists. Truthfully, my only immediate complaint - and it's a small one - is that the author sometimes falls prey to purple prose where it's entirely unnecessary, utilizing flowery language and paragraphs' worth of descriptors where simpler phrasing would not only have sufficed, but would have been more appropriate. Still, she doesn't do it so much that it really annoyed me, and I even admit to enjoying some of the thesaurus-thumping a bit (which is extremely rare for me; normally, as a long-time role-player, I get needlessly irritated at this kind of wordplay). I would definitely recommend this one, particularly if you are at all interested in urban-fantasy, the supernatural, magic, ghosts, vampires, necromancers, geeks, mystery-thrillers, decent female protagonists, surprise endings, supernatural politics, and good books. I had almost given up on this genre, so I guess that I owe Kat Richardson a 'thank you' for this one. I was pretty sure that I would never enjoy a book including vampire-characters ever again, which leads me to one last note: even though there are vampires in this book, it is NOT a vampire book. It's refreshing to read something that includes those bloodsuckers but doesn't entirely revolve around them. Cue the sigh of relief. Ahhhh.

[Edit] I wanted to add to this, as I have now finished the fifth book in the series. Looking back, I have noticed just how well Kat Richardson laid her groundwork. Characters and events from this book that seemed unimportant or unexplained have continuously reappeared, building on the frame provided here. I have been exceptionally impressed with the amount of planning that must have gone into the series before any of the books were written or published. Richardson is very talented at character-growth. I have noticed some complaints about the protagonist, Harper, but her seemingly slow development is very realistic when you consider the length of time this book covers (even book five is only two years in the future). I think that Harper's reactions are very human, and though she can come off as stubborn and even whiny, as one reviewer put it, I feel that these emotions are on par with what I would expect from a woman of her mettle. All too often the main character of a story is given a near supernatural ability to cope with events, but I far prefer the slower evolution found in this series. Though Greywalker is fully capable of standing on its own as a perfectly enjoyable novel, the real pleasure is derived from following the story all the way through and seeing exactly how the characters and the world change and develop along the way.

In short, Greywalker provides a very solid foundation for what is to come, both for the character -- emotionally and physically -- and for the complicated plot that, though it can't be seen clearly in this volume, is put into action at the very beginning and weaves carefully throughout the different arcs of the story. show less

This is the first book in a series, and while it's obvious at the end that it is starting a series, it is not annoying about that fact. In other words, while the door is left wide open for sequels, there is no stupid cliffhanger leaving the reader dangling.

I did enjoy the premise for this book. Essentially, the main character is legally dead for a couple of minutes, and when she's resuscitated she is able to access the ghost world -- otherwise known as the Grey. (Hence the title.) It's a little annoying that she spends a lot of the book denying that the Grey has any impact on her, when she's so obviously (to the reader) being affected by it, but it is also completely believable that she would want to ignore anything which reminds her of show more the fact that she died, even just for a brief moment. I plan on eventually continuing with the series: if she's still rejecting the Grey to the same extent in book two, then I may reevaluate my opinion of how much this colors my enjoyment of the series. (AKA: in book one, it's okay. In book two, a lot less okay.)

The characters in the novel were fun. I liked the main character, and the bulk of the supporting cast. I especially like the guy she gets to help her with her alarm system, and while he's "just a friend" in book one, I kinda suspect he may turn into a love interest in later books. I like the witch and the scholar couple that she gets Grey lessons from, too. (Sorry for the lack of names... I'm feeling too lazy to look up spellings.)

I do have high hopes for this series. It seems like a true urban fantasy series, and I hope that it doesn't go the way of some other urban fantasies that turned into paranormal romance love-fests (Anita Blake, I'm looking at you). I do enjoy paranormal romances, don't get me wrong. But I miss the good urban fantasy books that have all of the paranormal without the tons of sex. Maybe this will fill that void? Here's hoping. show less