Title: Downpour Series: Greywalker #6
Author: Kat Richardson
Published: August 2, 2011
Genre(s): Urban Fantasy
Page Count: 368
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:After being shot in the back and dying-again- Greywalker Harper Blaine's only respite from the chaos is her work. But while conducting a pre-trial investigation in the Olympic Peninsula, she sees a ghostly car accident whose victim insists that he was murdered and that the nearby community of Sunset Lakes is to blame.
Harper soon learns that the icy waters of the lake hide a terrible power, and a host of hellish beings under the thrall of a sinister cabal that will use the darkest of arts to achieve their fiendish ends...
While reading Downpour I had something of a bookish epiphany. It was a pretty cool moment and really made me understand myself more as a reader. See, I’m a big fan of the Greywalker series in the theoretical, but I find that in reality, I often struggle with the books. But I keep coming back to the series, even though I know that it’s never going to be an all-time favorite, because I love Kat Richardson’s ideas. And I realized that the reason I’ve been having this constant back-and-forth is really quite simple: Downpour (and its five prequels) are rather plot-driven novels, whereas I am an extremely character-focused reader. There’s nothing, honestly, wrong with this book—it just doesn’t hone in on the aspects of the story that I have a greater attraction to. It was a very enlightening self-discovery, to say the least.
But anyway, I think it goes without saying that my favorite parts of Downpour were the moments when protagonist Harper was off-duty and vulnerable with her boyfriend, Quinton. Those few and brief scenes are the only real times that Richardson focuses on characterization, so naturally those are the parts that I was most interested in. However, most of the book is focused on Harper’s unraveling of a mysterious magical lake near Port Angeles, Washington, and the Chinese demons who flock to it. The plot in this book hearkens back to the first few novels in the series, where Harper’s personal struggles and paranormal abilities were kept on the sidelines in favor of a complex investigation. Richardson is good at those types of plots, I think—unfortunately, I’m not really the reader for it, so I spent most of my time wanting to get some insight into Harper’s emotions and thoughts, which came far too seldom for my taste.
This book is interesting, though, in comparison to the fifth book in the series, Labyrinth, in how unfocused it is on Harper. I thought, personally, that the fifth book read a lot like a series conclusion, and was confused as to how the author was going to continue on for another four installments. But I think Downpour shows that there’s still longevity in these characters, though for me it was disappointing, after such a Harper-centric story, to return to a plot where Harper seems like little more than eyes and ears through which the reader unravels a mystery, rather than a fully developed character in her own right.
And don’t get me wrong. I want to like Harper—I do. But this is not a series focused on its protagonist’s growth, so I am not left with a definite feeling of who she is. There’s nothing truly objectionable about this, but I’m left feeling that there is a lack of depth in this particular area.
So, by and large, Downpour was not the success it could have been for another reader. I’ve started to think that as much as I like this series (and urban fantasy) on a theoretical level, it just may not be the genre for me. Which is unfortunate. I might finish up the Greywalker series, if only for those brief tidbits where Richardson allows Harper’s personality to shine out, but I’ll keep reading only with reasonable expectations.
