Underground
by Kat Richardson
Series Greywalker, #3Mass Market Paperback, 354 pg.
Roc, 2009
Read: August 17 – 20, 2015
So Harper’s pal/computer tech/security expert, Quinton, comes to her for a favor. Several homeless people in the area have gone missing, and some have shown up that look, well, eaten. By something large. Quinton would like Harper to look into it, see if there’s something that’s more up her particular alley than what the police are looking/equipped for.
Obviously, yes, or it’d be a very short — and incredibly dull — book.
Harper and Quinton end up on a search through the now underground remnants of Seattle’s bygone days, through the city’s homeless culture, and skirting the edge of local Native American myth (not nearly as mythic as most people think).
I’ve liked Quinton, and wanted to get to know him better. We get the opportunity to here — actually, we learn a lot about him. What we learn makes him pretty distinctive in UF, he might be run of the mill in Suspense/Mystery novels, though — but that makes sense. Richardson is basically writing Kinsey Millhone with ghosts and other supernatural whatnot.
Ben and Mara Danziger do make an appearance, but fairly late into the novel. I appreciated seeing them, but I was also glad that Harper doesn’t have to run to them right away. Ben gets more of the action this time than Mara, which was a good switch. Also, he’s a fun character. Many of the other characters from the previous two novels show up for a scene or two — to provide continuity as well as information on just whatever is snacking on Seattle’s poorest.
Pretty much everything worked well in these pages. Harper’s personality is enough to pull you in. Quinton and the world he introduces Harper to are enough to keep you. The bits of Seattle history were very interesting — even if most of it was variation on what I’ve read before about the underground city (and there’s plenty of fodder for return trips for Harper down there). The Native American elements were a nice addition to this world. I do think it was a little too easy to figure out the non-monster mysteries, Richardson might as well have been putting flashing neon around certain sentences, reading “Pay attention, this’ll be important.” Still, over all, everything worked just right.
The previous Greywalker novel, Poltergeist, was one of the last things I read in 2012, and I’ve been meaning to get back to the series since. Don’t ask me why I didn’t — I can’t give you (or myself) a satisfactory answer. It won’t be another 2 and a half years before I come back, I can tell you that. It’s not the most dazzling and dynamic Urban Fantasy series out there, but it’s good. And when you’re this good? You don’t have to be dazzling, you just have to deliver. Underground did.
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