Anna S. (annapi) reviewed on 1/2/2010 + 334 more book reviews

An assault on private investigator Harper Blaine leaves her dead for two minutes before she is revived. When she gets out of the hospital, she notices strange things happening to her, as if she occasionally walks into an alternate world of grey mist filled with ghosts. What she eventually learns is that her near-death has made her a Greywalker, a person able to move between this world and "The Grey" where supernatural creatures exist. What this ability will mean for her she does not yet know, but it causes creatures to be attracted to her, and soon she is in over her head in the affairs of vampires, ghosts, necromancers and a powerful artifact that can destroy the city and everyone in it.

The premise was intriguing, and the beginning took off at a brisk pace. Unfortunately it started to bog down somewhere in the middle, with Harper going off on investigations that didn't seem to advance the story forward except to get her into situations that allowed the author to play with the "Grey" and torment her heroine. The story's progress came in fits and starts and I started to get impatient with the pace in the last third of the book. Harper's stubbornness also felt a little contrived after awhile, and I felt that her romantic interest was under-utilized. Perhaps Richardson is saving him for the next book, but in this one the chemistry she created between them was allowed to fizzle out unsatisfyingly. I also felt that the vampires were too vague and contradictory as a species - extremely powerful and yet seemingly impotent or unwilling to act against the heroine without any convincing explanation. And one tiny annoyance for me was that I could not find any overt reference to the city this is supposed to be set in - maybe I just missed it or read too fast somewhere, but throughout the book I kept trying to figure it out and I still haven't managed to. For a first novel, a great start, but the climax fell a little short for me and the author will have to improve the whole concept of her paranormal world if I will continue with the series. I'll read the next one and then decide if the potential this contains is likely to be realized.

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