Customer Reviews

Dead Witch Walking (The Hollows, Book 1)

5 star:		(180)
4 star:		(121)
3 star:		(40)
2 star:		(26)
1 star:		(29)

 

 

Dead Witch Walking is a fantastically fun, first novel by Kim Harrison. The world Kim Harrison has created is marred by tomatoes. In our search for genetically engineered food and medicine, we created a nasty virus in tomatoes that has nearly wiped out mankind. This virus has exposed paranormal races to the world as they are immune. Society has splintered with all the upheaval and paranormal races have set-up residence in the Hallows. The Hallows can be compared to a Las Vegas for the paranormal. `Day-trippers' frequently take a walk-on-the-wild side to meet and mingle in the Hallows with werewolves, vampires, witches, and so on.

Rachel Morgan is a witch and an I.S. runner - similar to an FBI agent but for the paranormal world. Her career is going nowhere. It seems as though she can do nothing right and is given the lowest assignments available. Each day and night of work has become drudgery and Rachel is looking for a way out.

Dead Witch Walking quickly immerses the reader in a vibrant cast of characters. We meet Ivy, a living vampire; Jenks, a pixie with a lot of children; Trent, a businessman who may or may not be human and is believed to be dealing in Brimstone, a nasty drug, and so on.

Dead Witch Walking is a paranormal mystery that can easily be compared to Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden series or Laurell K. Hamilton's early Anita Blake novels. Rachel Morgan is a charming character that is very easy to like. She certainly has her issues, but she has none of the angst or brutality of Anita Blake.

Kim Harrison has created a fun book with laughs that are unexpected. The story line is not completely predictable and has many different twists and turns. I hope this is the beginning of a new series.

Kim Harrison describes herself as born in the Midwest. She has been called a witch, among other things, but has never seen a vampire (that she knows of). She loves graveyards and midnight jazz, and wears too much black. Please be sure to visit her website at: http://www.kimharrison.net/

White witch Rachel Morgan has been a bounty hunter for Inderland Security for the last three years and it's been a constant bumbling battle for good assignments to prove her worth. She's become bored and disillusioned with the job and she wants out. Problem is, retiring from I.S. means a swift and sure retirement from life. The I.S. doesn't take kindly to broken contracts.

She's got a risky idea that may get her around that, though...if she lives long enough to see it through. Rachel figures that if she can tag the largest brimstone dealer in the Hollows and Cincinnati area, she'll be able to get her contract paid off. However, getting the evidence to bring him down will be far from easy.

With the help of her pixy bodyguard and her living vampire roommate, she may just succeed. If she can quit getting caught.

Enter Kim Harrison's gripping debut novel and step into a world unlike any other. A world of vampires, pixies and fairies, witches and werewolves. A place where humans not only can no longer deny such beings exist, but in some cases, embrace the fact.

Harrison is sure to find success with this preternatural tale of intrigue. The individual characteristics of the bounty-hunting trio entwine to form a bewitching and mysteriously endearing partnership and add further depth to an already captivating tome. Welcome to The Hollows. Watch your back.

This book was one of the most enjoyable reads imaginable, an absolute delight. I positively cannot wait for the sequel. I'm shocked not to have found anything else by Kim Harrison out already, considering just how great this was. Amazing first effort. Amazing effort, period.

I was a huge Laurell K. Hamilton fan on the Anita Blake series, though recent efforts have been a disappointment. This was, for me, as much fun as early LKH. Similarly, it was a strong, funny, female character, in a supernatural alternate modern reality with fangs, and fur, and fey.

That, however, is where the similarities end, as this actually managed to be unique, with its own wonderful voice and style, and a whole new alternate world, like no other I've seen.

The book was strong on plot, with lots of nice twists and turns, had wonderful, enjoyable, well thought out and developed characters, well described scenes, and plenty of action.

The magic and magical beings were both impressive, and at times, hysterically amusing. (I will not post a spoiler, of course, on what her shape changing spell does, but suffice to say, it's original, and it's pretty darned funny!)

The Pixie that the main character, Rachel Morgan, partners with is a blast, and at the same time, sympathetic. I loved the blend. She gave the characters, even those other than Rachel, some real dimension. She also made the character Rachel come across as someone whose fate you could care about.

Overall, a terrific, fun read, that kept me up until done. I'm a pretty voracious reader, and I don't say that about too many of late.

A friend recommended this book after I complained that all of my favorite authors were between books.

Oh boy! This book is one wild ride. I won't even compare Ms Harrison to Ms Hamilton, as some are doing. Ms Harrison has a style of her own and thank goodness.

Ms Harrison's universe is populated with humans as well as other creatures. It's Rachel Morgan's job as runner for Inderland Security to bring in the bad guys--witches who practice the black arts, pixies gone wrong, weres on the prowl, etc.

Because of a set of inauspicious circumstances, Rachel decides to quit I.S. Unfortunately for Rachel, no one quits I.S.

In a short time, Rachel has a price on her head, two new partners--a non practicing vampire and a pixie--and her own bounty hunting service.

Oh and I'll let the reader be surprised by Trent. I keep telling friends that there's more to this guy than we know. And maybe he and Rachel... Yeah, yeah, I know he's bad but...


I loved this book. Ms Harrison has written a well thought-out and well- written first book and I cannot wait for her second in the series--THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UNDEAD.

In Kim Harrison's debut novel, Dead Witch Walking, she has created an alternate reality where a terrible bioengineering accident in the 1950's killed most of mankind. When the survivors began taking tally of the living, humans were surprised to find themselves evenly numbered with creatures they hadn't known existed. Vampires, wares, witches, and all other sort of Inderlands were not only real, but they were also tired of hiding. Unable to beat them and not willing to join them, humans and Inderlands created laws governing all of society and established two agencies to police them - the human run Federal Inderland Bureau (FIB) and Inderland Security (IS).

Rachel Morgan is an earth witch and a disgruntled runner for the IS. Her cases haven't gone right for months and her ghoul of a boss, Denon, won't give her any slack. While on a run to tag a tax-evading leprechaun with her trusty pixie backup, Jenks, Rachel decides she's had it and convinced the leprechaun's three wishes can protect her from the IS death squad, Rachel breaks her contract. Before she can make wish number two, Ivy, a living vampire and one of IS's best runners decides she wants to partner up with Rachel and for a wish she'll protect her from any vampire assassins. And of course, Jenks the pixie wants a piece of the action too.

With two new partners and no more wishes, Rachel has to figure out a way to pay off her IS contract without getting herself killed. A corrupt and mysterious man, Councilman Trent, catches Rachel's attention when she discovers he heads an elaborate drug-running operation. Knowing the bounty from his head will pay off her contract, Rachel and her friends are on the hunt.

Kim Harrison weaves a story with plenty of humor, magic, adventure, and steam to delight any reader. If you like Charlene Harris or Laurell K. Hamilton, you'll love Kim Harrison! I thoroughly enjoyed this book (read it in one sitting) and can't wait for the sequel.

Who knew that a book about a bounty-hunting witch running from her own bounty would have such a sweet soul?

On alternate Earth where half the human population has been wiped out from a vegetable-borne virus, all the creatures from the fairy tales, (ie, witches, vampires, pixies, fairies, "Weres," etc), dubbed "Inderlanders," have live a "seperate but equal" existance with humans, complete with their own police force, "Inderland Security." When Rachel, an down-on-her-luck bounty hunter quits the I.S. and takes one of the agency's best operatives with her, a bounty is put on her head by her boss. She has to fight off advances from her hormonally-challenged roommate, and THEN she discovers that one of the city's leading human citizens is growing and smuggling drugs. Things spiral out of control from there.

After a strong set up, Harrison takes time to develop her characters fully. The main plot of the book takes a backseat to several of the subplots involving secondary characters. And that's a GOOD thing. The book comes to a satisfying conclusion (not a cliffhanger), but there are enough mysteries and unanswered questions to fill the next several volumes.

This is a very strong early novel. Harrison really spends time letting the reader get to know the characters. Her style is descriptive, yet tight and well-paced. More importantly, this ostensively neo-goth story has a real heart behind the fangs and there's a sweetness to all the characters that surprised me but also entertained me. The tone is not nearly as dark as the cover would indicate. This is a good title for most anyone who wants a little adventure.

I vacillated between giving this a 2 or a 3 star, and gave it 3 to be nice. To place myself in readership, I'm a big fan of Harris, Briggs, and Butcher (Dresden) but gave up on Hamilton after 'Obsidian Butterfly.' After having read a great many of the reviews on this book, I suspect the five star reviewers have a personal stake in this book somehow and are rating the well-written, critical, lower-starred reviews poorly on purpose. I've seen it happen to other books reviewed on Amazon.

I'm having no difficulty reading this book - no problems finishing or anything - but I found the first chapter rather hard. I think it's odd that for someone who tells so much of the story instead of showing it, Harrison chose to show the first chapter instead of telling it, but near-fatally flubbed the showing. Hamilton, Harris, and Briggs did a far, far better job of explaining how vampires, etc., became mainstream than Harrison did.

There are some good parts to this book. First, Harrison put in a lot of effort to craft her world's backstory. That's good. She spent time working on linguistic stuff like slang. Good there too. She has a female vampire instead of a male vampire. That's actually rather a relief - far too many opposite-sex vampires running around. And the explanation of how a magic circle works is really great. That was actually pretty damn original.

But there are problems. World-building problems first: Humanity is decimated by a mutation that attacked tomatoes. OK. How? Virii that attack plants do not attack humans, no matter how bioengineered they are. And this assumes that everyone eats tomatoes. They don't. Most people who get sick off of produce get sick off of bacteria put by humans on the skins of produce. It didn't ring true. So, no one eats tomatoes and no one allows bioengineered drugs or anything like that, which means no more insulin for diabetics, etc. However, in the pizza-making scene, Rachel is dotting her pizza with square pieces of tomato. Excuse me? And where's she getting the tomatoes? If humans hate and distrust tomatoes, aren't they burning the tomato farms? Continuing onward, even if humanity had a violent reaction against "bioengineered" drugs, would they really be throwing the baby out with the bathwater? No more insulin? No more cancer research? What?

More questions: what's an Inderlander? Why pick that name? Second, why is a witch an Inderlander? Are witches not human? What about being a witch would spare one from catching this hideous disease, if witches are human? Then, of course, why does Rachel keep running headlong into danger if she keeps getting caught? Where's the learning curve? If I'm sitting here thinking the main character is stupid, why should I root for her? If (as Harrison explains) a witch is a female and a warlock is a male, then why are warlocks sneered at, considered sub-standard, etc. when (as Harrison explains) there's nothing barring a man from being just as good at magic as a woman? Also, for all you authors and prospective authors out there - how about we have a sympathetic, main character who wears Armani suits, for cryin' out loud? Or has "Armani" become a sort of short-hand for "rich, suave, crooked man"? Here, in this book, we have yet another villain who wears Armani.

Rachel spends the first part of the book whining about her miserable life and how everyone is picking on her. It makes her unsympathetic. I caught myself wondering if she was so unpopular at work because she whined all the time. But then I didn't understand why the Vault receptionist went out of her way to help Rachel. Harrison did not explain any connection between the two. Rachel has significant issues with Ivy - ok, got that, but why on earth is Ivy bothering with Rachel? Harrison explained that they'd been friends or partners earlier, but didn't set it up enough to explain why Ivy would put up with Rachel later in the book's timeline. Also, I don't understand why Rachel's boss hated her so much, or why IS would put a contract out on anyone's life if they quit. I mean, I *really* didn't understand that. There was absolutely no explanation as to why any sort of above-board agency would have a policy like that. Also, what's with the grapevine? Rachel quits/gets canned from IS and *everyone* including her old landlady and her new next-door-neighbor knows about it within seconds. Maybe there's some sort of magical gossip network, but if there was, wouldn't Rachel be in on it or at least know about it? Yet there's absolutely no sign that there is any sort of FTL gossip network in Cincinnati, which smacks of deus ex machina. And what makes her so important that everyone would know she had quit and had a price on her head? I mean, in the Anita Blake series, Anita has a nation-wide reputation as the Executioner, if I remember correctly. With something like that, instant word would be understandable. But some two-bit community-college-educated low-ranked IS 'runner' (and why are they called runners?) should not merit that sort of treatment. Rachel is just not that important, at least as Harrison paints it.

Then there's the bad guy. Harrison's bad guy is so obvious that he might as well have worn a button saying "generic bad guy." Then I really had to figure out why it was so evil of the bad guy to be doing this bioengineered drug thing. Curing cancer on the sly is bad? Why would Rachel think it's bad? What sort of morality is this? Manipulating people and selling honest-to-god drugs is bad, but medical research for drugs that save lives? Huh? Butcher's Marconi is a *much* better bad guy. And why doesn't Trent just kill her once he catches her? Oh, and a big one: if Rachel, a sort of 'cop,' can let a criminal go in exchange for wishes (basically, a bribe), then she's corrupted, and why should we like her? Isn't *she* a bad guy? And why would "tagging" Trent get the price off her head? Does she get a cash prize from an agency she no longer works for, which would help her pay off the bounty on her head? Would the fame and notoriety make her untouchable? How, exactly, would this help her? We are told nothing except that she believes it WOULD help her.

Then there was the part that interrupted my reading experience the most. I thought this was obvious, but no other reviewers really commented on it. A MINK IS NOT A RODENT. A mink is a weasel. They eat meat. They're vicious little buggers, too. Mean. They can produce a stink rather like a skunk, which is another version of the weasel. Imagine someone writing about caging a cat and then feeding it broccoli under the mistaken impression that a cat was a rabbit. That's about what this was like for me. Every time one of these errors popped up, I stopped reading and started yelling at the author. It would have been child's-play to catch this error - the author should have checked an encyclopedia or Googled "mink" or something, but she didn't. Boo on her, and boo on her editors. And if you think this is small - well, she spends dozens of pages as a mink and people comment on how minks are farm vermin and feed her carrots. So it's not.

This book contains far more errors of continuity, character, fact, background, etc. than most other books in the genre, but I'm not upset that it echoes Dresden or Blake or other famous main characters of the same ilk. I am perfectly happy to read the same basic idea from the point of view of several different authors because each author can create a character that might on the surface be similar (who cares that Rachel and Anita both have curly hair? Who cares that Rachel and Dresden both fight demons?) but who, in the details, is different. And, frankly, not all stories of this genre need to involve a human girl hooking up with a vampire (or a werewolf) to be decent - romance isn't a *requirement* for this genre. (Though, yeah, if random strangers are trying to kill Rachel, then why the hell does she automatically trust this Nick guy?)

In short, this book's plot was laid out ahead of time and then everything was shoehorned into it. This book would have benefitted from an honest conversation between a couple of editors and the author. That it's so choppy and full of errors, that its main character is unsympathetic, etc., is at least as much the editor's fault as the author's. The book should have been held back from publication until it was rewritten.

Rachel Morgan works as a runner for IS, Inderland Security, the police agency for the supernatural beings of Cincinnati. Lately, she seems to be having a huge run of bad luck and only gets cases that beginners are assigned. As luck would have it, she is assigned to execute a warrant on a leprechaun. A pixie named Jenks is her backup, the fairies won't work with her anymore. She runs into a vampire colleague at the leprechaun's place of business and somehow at the end of it, they all quit IS, and each have a wish. Ivy, the vampire, and Jenks are free and clear of their contracts, but Rachel has a death threat issued on her until she pays off her IS contract.

She sees a way to make this happen. All she has to do is prove that a prominent councilman is running illegal brimstone, easier said than done. The adventures that the trio have during the case make this book very hard to put down. The next one should be even better since all the major characters have been introduced and described. This is a great read, I started it and didn't put it down until I got to the last page.

All the recent hype about vampire novels is mostly wasted on me. I can't get into most of it. All the pseudo-romance-novel sensuality and the melding of sex/violence themes is quite often just too disturbing. But I LOVED this book. The only disappointing thing for me? It's obvious this is the start of a series and I now have to wait for future installments. The main character is gritty, pragmatic and all-too-human. She is forced into her "heroic" role by circumstance and ends up demonstrating a courage and strong sense of right and wrongness that is ultimately believable. Her pixie sidekick Jenks adds just the right touch of comedic relief to the typically gothic subject matter. And I found the side-plot surrounding her fear and frequent unwitting attraction to her vampiric business partner very well done. The story never bogs down and the world of post-genetic-apocalypse is intriguing and logical. I'm really looking forward to future installments in this series. It's not just a Buffy rip-off with lots of sexuality. It's a well-written story of a character searching for personal vindication, learning to trust and facing adversity. Highly recommended.

A while back, I picked up Dead Witch Walking, started it, put it down, and walked away. It's so complicated. It's not candy. But after a while, I ran through most of the other paranormal series out there right now and I thought, well, everybody loves Kim Harrison, I might as well give her another shot. And boy am I glad that I did. I devoured all the books through A Fistful of Charms in the space of a week and I can't wait for the next installment of the series.

What makes the Hollows so great is exactly that it IS so complicated - all of the characters are multi-dimensional, all the plotlines have layers and then layers and even more layers. Harrison's personal badge is a burning bunny - she says that ideas are like cute little bunny rabbits, they seem so cute and snuggly and then just when you least expect it they catch on fire and become powerful and dangerous. And that's what you get when you read.

So Rachel Morgan has a problem - she quit her job, and that's not allowed, and now her old boss has put out a contract on her life. When she's not dodging assassins, she's trying to find a way to buy out her own contract and getting messed up in local politics, which are shadowy at best. But for all the darkness outside, she finds warmth and friendship at home, a motley little family. It's great.