Book 19: Grave Witch

For something a little bit different, I decided to go back to my pet genre (urban occult/fantasy/paranormal). Grave Witch was a book that was a nice diversion that uses the essence of the genre.

        Grave Witch is the first book in the Alex Craft series by Kalayna Price. I wasn’t in love with the way this being a first book in a series. There was too much that seemed to beg for a book prior to Grave Witch. The book kept referring to friendships and cases not shown.   It’s good to walk into a series with things set up between characters but you don’t want to make the reader feel like they are missing something. For me, I felt like I was missing some of the earlier details.

        The characters are the strength of the book. I really like Alex. She’s a tough private eye who is broke. She has an unusual skill of being a grave witch (a witch who can raise shades (memories of the dead), talk to ghosts, communicate with Death and etc).  I liked how she was a bit of a softie too. But there were times, she would jump from soft to tough in a too quick of a turn around.  I also really like Det. Andrews. He’s a bit of a hard nut to crack. He’s a tough, hard nose but later you learn he’s been hired by Alex’s estranged father. But my favorite character was Death. He would just come in and add so much juice to the plot. Plus I love how he comes out and tells Alex that he loves her.

        The plot wasn’t bad. It was a classic type of set up. Girl gets tied up by a paranormal case and the world seems to be fighting against her succeeding in learning the truth. Along the way she finds a love interest who she may or may not be interested in. I’m just so glad that my initial thought about Andrews was quickly proven to be wrong. Last thing I needed was another book have an ending telegraphed way too early in.  Due to my love of the genre, the ‘surprising’ plot twists hardly that.

I’m not in love with this book yet it’s not a bad book. I would definitely read more of the series but it’s not something I will go out of my way to find. A classic 3 star out of 4 star rating for me.