This evening I finished Underground by Kat Richardson, the most recent in her Greywalker series, an urban fantay series about private investigator Harper Blaine whose two-minute death resulted in her being able to see the Grey, the foggy in-between world of magic, ghosts, and the paranormal. The books read more like straight up mysteries, like detective fiction, rather than fantasy. Richardson has a knack for making the fantastic sound very, very real and Harper’s no-nonsense attitude helps lend that cast to the world (it’s first person and Harper is a very clinical narrator).

If you don’t normally read fantasy but you like mysteries, I’d recommend this series because it certainly doesn’t read like Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files or Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson books, for instance, both of which are very fantastic in terms of the amount of fantasy elements and lore involved, the amount of actual magic that happens, etc. The Greywalker series leans more toward ghosts and thus has a decidedly historical and retrospective bent to it, because ghosts usually bring up issues of the past and/or crime, both of which themes play influentially large roles in each book of the Greywalker series. The lore that actually does pop up is historical, ethnic, or scientific in substantiation, which is really unusual. I enjoy it.

An example of this more technical lean to the urban fantasy elements, from Underground itself, comes in the form of a point one character makes to another about mid-book regarding the improbability of the existence of werewolves:

Everything I’ve seen tells me that magic tends to respect the laws of physics — kind of freaky physics, but lawful physics. For total form-shifting to happen in less than, say, a couple of days, max, it would have to break conservation of mass, conservation of energy, and the laws of thermodynamics at the very least. If shape-shifting does exist, then it’s an illusion, not an actual form change — unless it happens very slowly, which doesn’t seem to be the case. If someone were to change from human to wolf he’d have to make a whole lot of physical changes very rapidly, shedding or gaining mass and using up a ton of energy. There just isn’t enough elasticity in the system to allow it — he’d burst into flames from the heat of the energetic change alone.

I’m a dork; I like that sort of explanation.

I liked the book. I think I liked it better than Poltergeist, book two, which was decidedly strange. This one was decidedly strange, too, though. Harper Blaine’s world of the paranormal in Seattle, WA is so interesting and I have to admit, it sucks me in regardless of how weird or technical Richardson gets. She also had a lot of Indian legend/myth stuff in this one, as well as a lot about Seattle and its history (well, the last two had that too) and I enjoy that. Her descriptions, though, strike me as either lyrical or not explicit enough, which is fine, but sometimes when she describes Seattle I get lost because she’s going just a step short of a whole staircase, and I can’t see the image she’s drawing for me. I have never been to the west coast of the United States so it’s really hard for me to visualize Seattle, for instance, which I haven’t seen a ton of in movies or TV (unlike Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Las Vegas, for instance). When she takes for granted that I know things, I get miffed; if she were setting this book in a fictional series, she’d have to be more thorough, but I guess she can get away with assuming we know what things look like. I tend to prefer an author build the world of the story regardless of how well known the book is. Take New York City and make it your own, for instance, don’t just assume we all know what it generally looks like. It’s the slant of the narrative voice on that description that makes it pop from the page into my mind’s eye, and sometimes Harper’s voice just didn’t do it for me.

Yes for the plot surprises (or not so surprises?) though. Yes for the minor character development. Yes for her love life’s shift. (The book isn’t romance so it handles the love life in a really good way — classy and realistically without distracting from the main plot or sacrificing character.)

What’s weird is this book fits into the category of books for me that I can put down and walk away from comfortably. It’s not a thwwwp book by any stretch, though the last five or so chapters were thwwwp-ish, mostly because I’d given the book that much by then so I had to know what happened. But I’m reading it and sometimes I’m thinking, “Why? What is the element that keeps me reading?” General curiosity, I think. Not overwhelming need-to-know curiosity. Chalice was like that, too, usually, and so have the last few Dresden Files books. But what’s weird is that I no longer mind in the way I think I would have been annoyed about a few years ago. I enjoy books so long as I like them and they hold my attention and interest above all other distractions — they don’t need to suck me in. (Though of course I love a book that does that.)

I’ll pick up the next in the series when it comes out, no doubt. Now on to Small Favor by Jim Butcher.