Kat Richardson

Greywalker — (2006-2012) Publisher: Harper Blaine was slogging along as a small-time P.I. when a two-bit perp's savage assault left her dead. For two minutes, to be precise. When Harper comes to in the hospital, she begins to feel a bit... strange. She sees things that can only be described as weird-shapes emerging from a foggy grey mist, snarling teeth, creatures roaring. But Harper's not crazy. Her "death" has made her a Greywalker — able to move between our world and the mysterious, cross-over zone where things that go bump in the night exist. And her new gift (or curse) is about to drag her into that world of vampires and ghosts, magic and witches, necromancers and sinister artifacts. Whether she likes it or not.

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Greywalker

This is not a traditional review of Kat Richardson’s Greywalker. I’m going to talk instead about the technique Richardson uses to introduce her paranormal world and her main character’s magical power. 

Richardson’s premise is that abutting our dimension is a transitional dimension known as the Grey. Some creatures live in the Grey; some come through it from other places. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts and ghouls move about freely in it, and can shift easily from the Grey to here. 

Most (not all) urban fantasies start with a character who is already magical. Harry Dresden is a wizard; October Daye is half faerie. Richardson’s first book is an origin story. It’s the tale of how Harper Blaine became a Greywalker. 

Harper Blaine is a Seattle private detective with an office near Pioneer Square. In the first chapter, a struggle with an assailant leaves her nearly dead. In Chapter Two, a few weeks have passed. Harper is back at work, but returns to the hospital because she is still having lingering symptoms. Some are purely physical, such as fatigue and headaches, but some are strange and more disturbing: images at the corners of her eyes, strange odors, dizziness, and seeing things that other people don’t see. In the hospital, for example, Harper takes a fall when she tries to lie down on a hospital bed that isn’t there. 

A harried, overworked resident tells her, much to her surprise, that when they brought her in after the attack, she clinically died for two minutes. The doctor refers her to some people he knows who may be able to help her adjust. They’re not counselors, he says, and they may not be her cup of tea, but if she is having these weird symptoms they may be able to help. 

His referrals are a witch and her physicist husband who also does paranormal research.

I think this is the first urban fantasy I’ve read where the protagonist gets a medical referral to magical helpers. This is refreshingly practical and has the added bonus of being witty. 

Harper is still working, specifically on a missing person case. The reader catalogues the situation as Harper hears it from her client, and we make immediate assumptions. The client’s college-age son, who has always stayed in touch with her, has stopped calling or visiting. The last time she saw him he was very pale, sleeping all day, and couldn’t keep food down. He had been hanging out with a nightclub crowd who kept late hours and dressed in Goth style. We know exactly what has happened, but Harper doesn’t, not yet. 

She does meet Maya and Ben, the witch and the researcher, who explain about the Grey. Harper has the ability to cross the portal and enter the Grey, and she is frequently doing this without realizing it. Harper assumes that she acquired this ability because of dying; Maya is skeptical. Lots of people have near-death experiences and do not become Greywalkers.

It is page 159 before Harper meets a vampire. Because of her training and gradual acceptance of her abilities and the reality of what she is seeing, Richardson is able to short-cut the disbelief/rationalization/acceptance cycle. Harper can see the vampire in the Grey, and knows he’s no longer fully human. 

There is a fun scene where she takes the vampire to Ben and Maya’s house; Ben asks the vampire if it might not actually be a zombie since it appears to be dead. The vampire considers, then says it still has free will, so no, not a zombie. 

The 158 pages leading up to this meeting have not just been filled with Luke-and-Yoda-on-the-swamp-planet training. Harper has been working another case, searching out a mysterious “parlor organ” for a strange European client. As her proficiency in the Grey grows, so does her suspicion about the client and the musical instrument. 

Anyone planning to write an urban fantasy should take a look at Greywalker, just to see how Richardson does this. I thought there were a few small glitches, but Richardson lays out a textbook-caliber example of one way to introduce your magical character and the cast of supporting roles you will need later on. Greywalker is a great opening to a refreshing series. —Marion Deeds

Poltergeist

Poltergeist is the second Kat Richardson GREYWALKER novel. A few years have passed since Greywalker, marked by the growth of Ben and Mara’s son Brian from a babe-in-arms to a talking toddler, and Harper Blaine’s increasing proficiency in navigating the transitional dimension next to ours, called the Grey. Harper clinically died for two minutes, and during that time, “crossed over,” triggering this strange ability.

Harper is hired by an egotistical and unethical professor of psychology to vet the results of an experiment in the paranormal. Professor Tuckman has gathered together a group of eight people and is attempting to re-create the 1970s “Philip Aylesworth” experiment, creating an artificial ghost based on the group’s energy. Tuckman wants Harper to confirm that the results the group is now getting with their manufactured ghost, “Celia,” are genuine, except, of course, for the results he has already faked in order to “encourage” the participants.

While she is inventorying the lab where the experiments take place, Harper slips into the Grey and observes a disturbing knot of psychic energy. Before she can interview all the participants of the group, “Celia” brutally murders one of them. As Harper begins to investigate, the ghost becomes increasingly violent, attacking the group members both in and out of the lab.

Richardson is confident in this second outing. The supporting characters are developed and have just enough time and space in the story. Harper’s experiments in the Grey are interesting. Structurally, the plot has a couple of cracks that bothered me. Midway through the book, Harper comes across a piece of information about one of the group members that should be not only a red flag, but a big flashing red light. She does investigate this, but in a leisurely way. Later in the book, she captures the poltergeist energy in an ingenious magical device, but the entity escapes. The escape is telegraphed several pages in advance and makes Harper seem negligent when she isn’t. Richardson needs the entity to escape so she can get us to the devastating climax of the book, but this is done at Harper’s expense.

Balancing these problems, the descriptions of Seattle are fresh, concrete and witty. In the first book, I worried that Harper had no non-magical friends. In Poltergeist, with the bookstore owner and the restaurant family, we begin to see Harper’s network of friends from before she became a Greywalker.

The story is very dark, and Harper’s pet ferret, Chaos, provides a bundle of warmth, energy and humor to break up the bleakness.

The concept of a manufactured psychic entity, controlled by and feeding on a human collective is not completely new (witness the actual experiment Richardson used as a springboard) but the Greywalker abilities, the well-described settings and Richardson’s characters make this an original use of the element. I was very satisfied with Poltergeist and will be looking for the next book in this series.
—Marion Deeds

Underground

Underground is the third in Kat Richardson’s Greywalker series, which features Harper Blaine as a Seattle private investigator who can see the “Grey” — the borderland between reality and magic, life and death, past and present. Harper gained this ability when she died for two minutes in an attack by the subject of an investigation.

Underground starts so slowly that I feared Kat Richardson had lost her way. It’s difficult to imagine that a hard-working private investigator with plenty of work would dive into a case with no client, especially one that, like this one, poses considerable risk of physical harm to an already physically overstressed body. Yet not once in the course of the book does Harper even mention that a paying client or two is paying second fiddle to her quest to find a monster in the depths of Seattle in order to save the lives of the homeless. It’s a noble quest, no question, but wouldn’t one have a second thought or two about leaving this particular investigation to the authorities?

Despite the practical problems, though, the book really gets going about halfway through. Richardson has clearly done her homework about underground Seattle, Seattle history, and Native American mythology, and her research is evident on every page. I love a book that can teach me something about a monster with the unlikely (and oddly funny) name of Sisiutl, and how this Native American myth ties in with other traditions around the world. And I enjoyed learning about how Seattle had to be raised — the whole darn city, apparently — in order to avoid the effects of the tides. The sidewalks remained below for a considerable time, so that pedestrians had climb ladders to get to where they needed to be — ladders that often led to deadly falls if one slipped in the rain. Richardson isn’t the type of writer who feels the need to give you every fact she picks up in the course of her research; she uses her information with a good deal of art, only once resorting to a straightforward infodump by having her protagonist join a tour of underground Seattle.

Harper’s romantic entanglements get more interesting here, too. I appreciated the reality of her relationship with Will, painful as it was for Harper, and got a kick out of everything new we learn about Quinton, her security expert. Richardson clearly knows how to put together a series: there are a few subtle set-ups for the next book in the course of these relationships, as well as in Harper’s ongoing friendship with Ben and Mara Danziger and their pet ghost, Albert. It’s a good cast of characters, and one that should provide Richardson with plenty of fodder for additional entries in her series.

What especially makes this novel sing in its second half is its incredible sense of place. This seems to be true of some of the best urban fantasy out there these days: Seanan McGuire writes about San Francisco and environs in her October Daye series, while M.L.N. Hanover wrote convincingly of post-Katrina New Orleans in Darker Angels. Richardson tops them both with her detailed writing about Seattle’s past and present and its many different sorts of inhabitants. I’m already eager to read the next in the series, Vanished, which will take Harper Blaine to England, a place redolent with history. —Terry Weyna

Vanished

The fourth book in Kat Richardson’s Greywalker series, Vanished, is the best in the series so far. Harper Blaine, Richardson’s private investigator protagonist, gets a telephone call from an old boyfriend — not necessarily an unusual event, except that, in this case, the boyfriend happens to be long dead. He hints that there is much that Harper does not know that she needs to find out, quickly, and encourages her to come to Los Angeles to look into her past.

Los Angeles is not a place Harper enjoys visiting. She doesn’t get along with her mother, who appears to be weaving a net around husband-to-be number five. Mom is obsessed with appearances and materialistic in the extreme. But she holds information about Harper’s father, and, unknowingly, about Harper herself. It seems there was more to Harper’s temporary death — the one that lasted all of two minutes and gave her the ability to see and move about in the Grey — than was immediately apparent.

Harper returns to Seattle in response to an urgent summons from Edward Kammerling, the vampire who rules over all of Seattle’s other vampires. It’s not that Harper likes him – far from it – but the vampire is too powerful for Harper to ignore or snub. Kammerling hires her to travel to England to find out why the keeper of his accounts in that part of the world has gone silent. Harper is actually happy to have the excuse, because she’s been having nightmares about her former boyfriend, Will Novak, and wants to make certain that he’s okay.

London is where things start getting really nasty. There is an order of vampires that is sufficiently different and more powerful as to be very nearly another species, the asetem-ankh-astet. As one might guess from their name, they are Egyptian in origin, and have a leader called a Pharaohn. The Pharaohn, who has been maneuvering to get Harper into his clutches for reasons as yet unknown, is Wygan, the disc jockey who inserted a tangle of Grey into Harper in an earlier book. Wygan has teamed up with a vampire Harper greatly fears and whom she had believed dead, all to capture Harper and, apparently, kill and resurrect her yet again — with dire consequences to be expected, but again, their nature is mysterious. These asetem have captured and are torturing Will as a means to get Harper under their control, and she needs to find a way to rescue them without becoming a tool for these horrible creatures to use to their own ends.

Richardson’s writing is improving the more she writes. She is making people and places more and more visible for the reader, such as in describing a man this way:

He was a tall man who stooped horribly and had a small potbelly, so he looked like a numeral six. His hair had thinned into a monk’s tonsure and the bags under his eyes were heavier than those in an industrial laundry. Even pale in death, his nose, cheeks, and ears were reddened by the spiderweb veins of alcohol abuse.

It’s not an elegant description, but it’s perfect for the noir tone of this series. And Richardson does noir dialogue pretty well, too: “I fake sangfroid really well. Just close your eyes and think of ice cream.” It was hard for me to read that line and not hear Lauren Bacall say to Humphrey Bogart, “You know how to whistle, don’t you?” in To Have and Have Not.

Richardson has also ramped up the quality of her plotting. This is a nice, tight novel in which everything happens for a reason. Despite the length of the book, nothing is extraneous. Richardson has done her homework in the byways of London, delving into historical geography even down to the sewers. Reading about Kat slipping into and out of temporaclines in order to figure out what’s going on is a great pleasure.

Beware: this book doesn’t solve all, or even most, of the mysteries it posits. For that, you need to go on to the fifth book in the series, Labyrinth — assuming that Labyrinth has all the answers. I don’t know yet, as I’ve just started it, right on the heels of finishing Vanished. I’m rather glad that I didn’t discover this series until now, as a wait between Vanished and Labyrinth would have been unendurable. This way I get to fully immerse myself in Richardson’s world. I’m glad I’m reading about it and not living in it, heaven knows, but it sure is fun to read about Harper’s many perils. —Terry Weyna

Labyrinth

Kat Richardson’s Greywalker series is absolutely noir and it reaches the darkest tones ever in the fifth book, Labyrinth. In fact, this book is unrelievedly dark, scary and suspenseful. Richardson topped herself with the fourth book in this series, Vanished; now she has topped herself yet again.

Labyrinth requires one to have read the earlier books in the series; it does not stand well by itself. In fact, I was astonished to find how many clues Kat Richardson had lain about her fictional detective, Harper Blaine, as she told her earlier stories. The way she marshals all of the details previously set out reminded me of the way a lawyer writes a motion for summary judgment — grabbing this detail from that document, another from this deposition, a third from a bit of investigation by an expert, until they’re all woven together to form an airtight case — only here, what Richardson is doing, is formulating a plot that seems inevitable once all the clues have been assembled. It is skillfully done.

In Labyrinth, Harper returns home from London only to step into a nest of snakes — well, vampires, actually — immediately upon her return. Within the first fifteen pages of the book, Harper is attacked by a man — and I use the word “man” loosely — who wants her dead so that she can once again be resurrected, this time with further abilities to not only see but manipulate the Grey, the netherworld between life and death, the place where ghosts dwell and psychic energy has appearance, color and shape. Harper survives that encounter, but is forced to go into hiding at the same time she must be out and around in order to conclude her investigation and make sure she and her friends survive. Fortunately, the vampires she must avoid sleep during the day, but that isn’t sufficient protection when the Grey is constantly clamoring in her head, ever louder, and blood mages who remain fully human are laying traps.

Richardson has shown herself to be an able researcher in Blaine’s past outings, and, while history and geology are less necessary to this plot than in the earlier novels, she uses what information she needs here very well. Her mastery over her character and her character’s past is impressive as she weaves a tight net over Harper, but rarely lets Harper lose control. When Harper is overcome from time to time, Richardson makes us understand and even feel it, telling Harper’s story almost as if she is narrating a documentary instead of writing fiction. Labyrinth is compelling; the writing propels you from event to event, and being able to listen in on Harper’s torment as the Grey reaches ever more deeply into her brain, her body and her soul is fascinating and frightening. —Terry Weyna

Downpour

Kat Richardson’s Greywalker novels reached a crescendo with Labyrinth, the 2010 entry in the series. It is not surprising, then, that Downpour, Richardson’s newest novel, feels anticlimactic. How does an author top killing and resurrecting her main character? It’s especially difficult when the character comes back a bit less than she was in the last book; Harper Blaine’s connection to the Grey in this book is considerably weaker than it was. But Richardson has surprises in store for her readers, as usual.

Harper is on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, doing some bread-and-butter investigation of a potential witness for a lawyer client. It’s apparent to her that something is wrong with a local lake — something to do with the Grey — but she can’t quite tell what it is, except that there seems to be a great deal of power flowing through it. This is clear to her even before she sees the ghost of a fatal car fire, and discovers that the car and corpse have been sunk in the deepest part of the lake.

Despite this dramatic opening, Richardson wisely keeps Harper moving at a steady pace, doing what she needs to do to make a living, methodically working to keep up the legal work even as she adds an attempt to solve the homicide — because that’s clearly what the car fire was — into her busy schedule. At the same time, she attempts to avoid being arrested for homicide herself. Her former lover, William Novak, has disappeared, and Seattle police detective Rey Solis is trying to figure out whether Harper killed him, or William’s brother killed him, or exactly what did happen. Readers of Labyrinth know, and they also know that any attempt by Harper to tell the truth about it would at least get her locked up as mentally unstable, and more likely thrown into a cell with a murder charge. Add to the mix her blossoming relationship with Quinton, and she is one very busy woman indeed.

Most of this novel takes place on the Olympic Peninsula, and Richardson does her usual excellent job of establishing her place and time. Her descriptions of something as ordinary as the weather make the reader feel very much there with Harper as she confronts a series of unnatural creatures, most of which come from Asian mythology — Richardson does more with her research than most urban fantasy writers, and she does it well. Her cast of characters seems mostly comprised of unlikeable individuals, but given that the majority of them are stealers of magic, that makes good sense.

It’s a bit surprising that Richardson goes for the “get all the characters in one room and explain what’s going on” solution to the murder she spotted early on; that’s a mystery cliché that one doesn’t often see in fantasy. And perhaps that scene sums up the problem I had with this novel, for it seems to be a rather by-the-numbers story, one that can’t compete with Labyrinth and Vanished for drama. I was startled at how easily I could set this book aside, as I’ve read other entries in the series in a white heat, ignoring everything else that needed doing just to find out what happened next. Downpour is a competent addition to the series, but I missed the life-or-death breathlessness of Richardson’s earlier novels.

Perhaps Richardson is recovering from Harper’s death as much as Harper is. Certainly there is nothing about Downpour that will discourage me from reading Richardson’s next Greywalker novel. To the contrary, there is much that is encouraging, especially the picture of Harper living as normal a life as a woman who is of the Grey can live. I’m curious about where Richardson will take Harper, and any book that can make you long for the next one is doing something right. —Terry Weyna