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"Grave Secrets", Alice James
9 October 2022 11:59 pmNecromancer raises zombies and solves murders while dating vampires -- the pitch for this did sound rather like Anita Blake. On the other hand, I *liked* Anita Blake before she went over the top, so I was inclined to give it a go. (N.B. the 'and croquet' in the strapline is false advertising; there is one brief non-plot-relevant croquet scene near the beginning of the book :-p)
It turns out that the heroine is unusually short -- "five foot in my stockinged feet" -- and has curly hair, as well. (But 'copper curls and emerald eyes' rather than Anita's dark colouring, which isn't really a score in my book; if the author wanted to make her red-haired, she could simply have been ginger like the rest of us :-p)
The selling point for this book proves to be that the zombies are the good guys, for a change. (And generally on the losing side against vampires, since the latter have the advantage of speed and intelligence -- which makes the ability to command the undead less over-powered, even if you can raise recent victims out of a sense of burning outrage.) Indeed, we meet one of the most attractive characters in the book in the first chapter, when Toni (whose real name is 'Lavington', although nobody ever questions this!) raises him from his grave as part of an exercise in raising every single corpse in the cemetery.
In her case, being a necromancer is not an official profession, but what she terms a Compulsion, and she has been working her way in secret through the local supply of graves in order to keep her abilities in check. It turns out our heroine is actually an estate agent, although she doesn't manage to turn up for work very often in the course of this book and one does wonder how long she will hang onto the job at this rate! It can be surprisingly useful to have access to lists of the local desirable properties when you are trying to track down where vampires might be hiding out, however, and Toni meets her Designated Vampire Love Interest when he employs her to find him a house -- with suitable cellars.( Read more... )
It turns out that the heroine is unusually short -- "five foot in my stockinged feet" -- and has curly hair, as well. (But 'copper curls and emerald eyes' rather than Anita's dark colouring, which isn't really a score in my book; if the author wanted to make her red-haired, she could simply have been ginger like the rest of us :-p)
The selling point for this book proves to be that the zombies are the good guys, for a change. (And generally on the losing side against vampires, since the latter have the advantage of speed and intelligence -- which makes the ability to command the undead less over-powered, even if you can raise recent victims out of a sense of burning outrage.) Indeed, we meet one of the most attractive characters in the book in the first chapter, when Toni (whose real name is 'Lavington', although nobody ever questions this!) raises him from his grave as part of an exercise in raising every single corpse in the cemetery.
In her case, being a necromancer is not an official profession, but what she terms a Compulsion, and she has been working her way in secret through the local supply of graves in order to keep her abilities in check. It turns out our heroine is actually an estate agent, although she doesn't manage to turn up for work very often in the course of this book and one does wonder how long she will hang onto the job at this rate! It can be surprisingly useful to have access to lists of the local desirable properties when you are trying to track down where vampires might be hiding out, however, and Toni meets her Designated Vampire Love Interest when he employs her to find him a house -- with suitable cellars.( Read more... )
