Greywalker
Kat Richardson
Roc, 2006
U.S. mass market paperback, reprint
ISBN 978-0451461322
368 pages; $7.99

Poltergeist
Kat Richardson
Roc, 2006
U.S. mass market paperback, reprint
ISBN 978-0451461759
368 pages; $7.99

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 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.