Title: Poltergeist Series: Greywalker #2
Author: Kat Richardson
Published: August 7, 2007
Genre(s): Urban Fantasy
Page Count: 338
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Harper Blaine was your average small-time PI until she died - for two minutes. Now she's a Greywalker - walking the thin line between the living world and the paranormal realm. And she's discovering that her new abilities are landing her all sorts of "strange" cases.
In the days leading up to Halloween, Harper's been hired by a university research group that is attempting to create an artificial poltergeist. The head researcher suspects someone is faking the phenomena, but Harper's investigation reveals something else entirely - they've succeeded. And when one of the group's members is killed in a brutal and inexplicable fashion, Harper must determine whether the killer is the ghost itself, or someone all too human.
Having been pleasantly surprised by Harper Blaine’s first adventure, I was quick to pick up Poltergeist, hoping for more of the same. And while Kat Richardson’s stories are still entertaining, this book as a whole was just not as good as the first book in the series was.
The “case” this time has to do with a psychology experiment at a local university in Seattle, where a group is attempting to create a poltergeist with their minds. And it looks like it worked! Only…the poltergeist is kind of mean, and it’s probably that somebody—one of the team members—is manipulating it for their own nefarious purposes. And it’s up to Harper to figure out who, and why.
So, I think the problem with Poltergeist is that it’s too simplistic. Richardson’s pool of suspects is really limited—we know that whoever is manipulating the ghost is one of the research team, because they are the only people who know about the project. While Greywalker was surprising in its depth and scope, this sequel is just too cut and dry. All Harper has to do is run background checks on each team member and then follow some clues, and then voila, she has her culprit. This reminded me a lot of a Nancy Drew mystery with paranormal elements, and while I enjoy Nancy Drew, that style of mystery is really meant of children and not intelligent adults. Poltergeist is really just too easy.
I also had similar complaints with Richardson’s prose—namely that it’s not great. I’d also like to see more development with these characters, especially Harper. Even though she’s the protagonist, I don’t feel that I have as much insight into her personality as I’d like. Hopefully we’ll really start to see a change in her characterization in the next book, because she does have a lot of potential to be a stand-out lead character.
Altogether, I’m mostly ambivalent towards this book. Urban fantasy is generally a pretty fun genre, and while this book was fun at times, there were also numerous dull spots. Poltergeist was very different from the first book in the series, and I’m desperately hoping that Richardson will not make the sort of mystery present in this book the standard, going on from here.
