Customer Reviews

Vanished (Greywalker, Book 4)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Vanished is the 4th book in Kat Richardson's Greywalker series, and continues the adventures of Harper Blaine, a PI from Seattle who, in the first book, had a near death experience which leaves her with the unwelcomed ability to walk on both sides of life and death, in a sort of in-between odd place called "the grey." If you are familiar with "The Zone" in Tarkovsky's film, you get a vague idea of what the grey might be like, except that it is also filled with ghosts, monsters, and all kinds of dreadful things.

In this fourth book, Harper must go to London to solve the mystery of some disappearing assets, along with checking on an old friend who has been troubling Harper's dreams of late. Also, Harper explores her past, especially issues involving her late father, that may explain something about why Harper, of all people, became a Greywalker.

That is enough information! You don't want a spoiler! Suffice it to say that the book is full of wonderful adventure, the usual interesting characters that we really care about, and a storyline that doesn't falter at any point. Obviously, it would be good to start at the first book and read forward if you haven't already sampled Kat Richardson's writing. But it will be worth the time.

This is good adventure and great fun! I can hardly wait for the next one!

The protagonist Harper (is a greywalker; she can work the dimension between the ordinary and the far shores, the Grey, full of ghosts and nasties) takes a job in London for the head vamp of Seattle. Some of her background has been surfacing and in this story we see more emerge.

Excellent characters and nicely written. It helps to have a map of London (Goggle works great) handy but it isn't necessary. The author as usual has done a great job of background research so the story flows smoothly. The plot is very good as is the major sub plot. But warning this book ends in a not quite cliff hanger. It can be read by its self but I would recommend the earlier books in the series mainly because they are excellent reads and will help make sense of the characters.

Overall a highly recommended read.

In Seattle, the perpetrator failed to give private investigator Harper Blaine the two minute warning when he slammed her temple; for 120 seconds she was dead. However, unlike most people who suffer a near death experience only to come back to their mortal lives, Harper returned differently as a Greywalker who travels both sides of the boundary between the living and other realms (see GREYWALKER). Her investigations have taken one hellish twist from cheating spouses to cheating paranormals (see POLTERGEIST) who she can see, but these monsters see her too. Two years since her death, Harper has a dying need to know why she didn't just come back like most.

A call from the dead leads Harper to investigate her heritage with a focus on the pivotal event before her short-lived death; the demise of her father when she was young. In Los Angeles her mom says he killed himself. Harper reads his tormented writings in which he claimed the monster was coming and he feared for his sweet Harper. She tries to meet her dad's ghost, but frighteningly he is nowhere as if his spirit VANISHED. However, her mind is taken off of her confusion when vampires order her to London to look into a bloody mess. Harper uncovers a connection between England and Seattle that makes her wonder whether her "genes" made it inevitable for her to walk the grey line.

The latest Greywalker investigation is a terrific tale that takes a deep personal spin for the heroine as she inquires into her heritage in an attempt to better understand what happened. The story line is fast-paced and filled with plenty of action as for instance a plane ride to Los Angeles leads to a teenage female ghost popping in wet over Oregon with no one else on board able to sense her. Kat Richardson is at her best with this super urban investigative fantasy as the worlds of the grey and paranormal come figuratively alive through the intrepid but mentally tired heroine.

Harriet Klausner

Harper Blaine solves all kinds of weird and creepy cases as a Seattle P.I. When she died for two minutes, Harper became a Greywalker and has been seeing all sorts of dead creatures ever since. When a former (and dead) old flame contacts Harper about her past, she decides to go investigate her father's death. And she's shocked when she hears the truth. Then, head vampire Edward sends her to England to investigate a missing vampire colleague. She goes, if only to check up on Will, another former (living) boyfriend of whom she's been having strange dreams.

In this latest installment, we get a deeper look into Harper's past and what helped to shape her into the person she is - her demanding and overly-dramatic mother, her father's tragic death, and other childhood trauma. And as events unfold in this story, Harper discovers that someone has been pulling the strings behind the scenes for a while. She discovers more about her father and more about her destiny as a Greywalker.

There are plenty of twists and surprises in this story, coupled with fantastic characters that make for exciting reading. Harper travels from Seattle to L.A. to London along her journey of discovery. And Richardson's narrative gives the reader a feeling of being right there with Harper. Vanished is full of thrills, chills and mystery. And this is easily my favorite in the series so far. Greywalker a unique urban fantasy series that won't disappoint.

This is another solid entry in a good, albeit not excellent, series. See the other reviews for details. Suffice to say this book is far less obtuse than the last volume, and the character of Harper continues to develop.

I read the prior books. This one I listened to on audiobook. Unfortunately, the editor/author picked a narrator whose voice characterizations are an extremely poor fit for the 1st person narrative of the book. The narrator sounds like a valley girl reading "My Friend Flicka" to a kindergarden class. The Harper Blane character is strong and self sufficient, requiring a Kathleen Turner-type gritty voice. The audiobook version almost ruins the experience and atmosphere which Richardson is so good at delivering. DON'T GET THE AUDIOBOOK. If I was grading this book on the audiobook experience it would be lucky to get one star.

Read the book and enjoy the voice in your head. It's a good book. I will read the next one.

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 him. 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 way back in the first or second book in the series. 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.

I really enjoyed Vanished. It was the best of all four of the Greywalker series so far. I couldn't put it down... It was good to have Michael and Will back and the plot twists kept me guessing.

VANISHED provides a fine urban fantasy telling of a small-time PI who died for two minutes - and became a Greywalker, moving between the living world and the psychic universe. Her new abilities are bringing her all kinds of strange cases - and her own case investigates her transition to becoming a Greywalker in this blend of intrigue and fantasy: a pick for both mystery and fantasy libraries alike.

One of the big unanswered questions about Harper Blaine: Why did a two-minute stint in death turn her into a Greywalker, and not other people?

Well, now Kat Richardson has answered quite a few of the questions she's raised, while spinning up some brilliant plot threads for future Greywalker novels. In fact, her fourth novel "Vanished" is the most outstanding work that she's done to date, mingling more backstory for the hard-boiled heroine with more intense horror and fantasy.

A warning from a dead ex-boyfriend sends Harper back to Los Angeles. There she discovers some shocking facts about her father's death -- he committed suicide, claiming he was being followed by "the worm-man" and "the watchers." Also, his ghost is missing.

Then Edward Kammerling convinces her to check in on a friend of his in London, who has gone mysteriously missing. But the more Harper investigates, the she thinks that this is intertwined with the question of what drove her father to his death -- it involves amphorae filled with blood, a supposedly-dead enemy now undead and well, and an ancient breed of wormlike Egyptian vampires.

And Harper discovers that London's vampiric underground is being overcome by the "worm-men," and their Pharaohn (not a typo) has plans for the young Greywalker. What's more, they have captured her ex-boyfriend Will. With Will's younger brother and the eyeless, sinister Greywalker Marsden, Harper must somehow save her ex and stop the Pharaohn's minions.

Compared to Kat Richardson's prior books, "Vanished" is more of a horror story -- she twines together Egyptian myth, a hint of Lovecraftian monsters, steampunk (a jewel-eyed magic robot!) and the slimy things that repulse us all (a Gollumesque river monster with "fog light eyes"). But the most horrifying is the pallid, wormlike Asetem-ankh-astet, which spread chaos and can possess a dead human's body.

And Richardson's writing has matured as well, intertwining various subplots smoothly with the main one. Her style has plenty of eerie poetry in the descriptions ("A snarling monstrosity of spiderweb and bone poured out") and solid dialogue. As she builds the suspense to a climax, Richardson sprinkles the story with plenty of chaotic, dirty action scenes in the odd corners of London's graveyards and undergrounds.

But while she answers some of the longstanding questions in this series, she leaves several plot threads floating in the breeze. Clearly Harper has some bloody battles ahead.

And for the first time, Harper's backstory is sketched out in greater detail -- her child-star history, her shallow Hollywood mother, and the terrible losses that have filled her life (half of which she doesn't remember). But Richardson never lets her heroine get emo about it; she just charges on ahead, seeking the truth without fear for herself. The underused Michael is also revealed to be surprisingly mature and reliable, while Marsden makes you chuckle and shiver at the same time.

"Vanished" is the best that Kat Richardson has turned out thus far, and everything indicates that her next work will be even more brilliant. Think a female Jim Butcher, with more ghosts and ghastliness.

Fourth in the Greywalker urban fantasy series revolving around a private detective able to walk in a fold of space than sits between the normal and the paranormal. Harper is based in Seattle but most of this story takes place in London. It's also Part 1 of a sinister plot.

My Take
Oh man, the tension Richardson created!! It was a bit slow to start but once it did. I could not race fast enough to keep up!

I've always fantasized about going back in time and then doing a fast-forward through time to watch, to observe how the landscape changes over the centuries. Now we get to do this with Harper as she navigates the time slips within the Grey in London. I suspect I'd get caught up watching the people of all those different centuries engage in their own lives instead of Harper's necessary pursuits. I never knew Tyburn Tree had been located near where Marble Arch stands now.

A few quibbles. Harper is so careful in the first six hours she's in London to contact Bryson to report when she has so little to say and yet just a few hours later when she has a ton of information that Edward really should hear about, she's not at all bothered about letting him or Bryson know. Sure Edward gets kidnapped or disappears or...something but nothing is said about Bryson. Why isn't she letting him know what she discovers? It's pretty damn critical. Especially considering that his and her chief enemy is still there in Seattle!

There's almost too much action to take in. Too much information that comes streaming in to fill in Harper's past. Worse, Richardson drops you with Harper on the plane coming back to America so we have no idea what's happening in Seattle. If Edward is back. What's Wygan doing? Is Quinton okay? And all the background, the behind-the-scenes machinations that have gone into creating the Greywalker that Harper is now is just churning away in your brain...argh!! Be sure to have the next book in the series, Labyrinth (Greywalker, Book 5), standing by...you'll need it!

The Story
An old boyfriend of Harper's who got killed on a stakeout in LA some years ago appears in her dreams and starts Harper on her quest to learn more about her past. A past in which she learns more than she wants to know. About her dad. About her own earlier death. The family legacy on her father's side and how Wygan is shaping her for his own ends. Cary Malloy makes her aware and the ghost of her father's old secretary, Christelle LaJeunesse, gives credence to her father's journals. The old family photos with their unexplainable streaks of light, smoky faces, "tricks of the light" that mar every photo in which Harper or her dad appeared.

It's while Harper is in the Los Angeles area that Edward contacts her in a panic. Unrest is rising amongst the vampires in Seattle and the disappearance of his business partner in London has Edward insistent upon hiring Harper. That Harper is ideal for reasons they both understand.

A slip in a Grey temporacline introduces Harper to golems and how they are made. How they are used. Useful information but disturbing when she encounters one of a friend. Almost worse is the encounter at the end of a sewer tour in a kayak with a maddened wraith, Norrin, who lurks in the catacombs of old and ancient London down by the bricked-over Fleet River.

Harper quickly learns the pattern of persuasion when the disturbing nightmares she's been having about Will Novak, her ex-boyfriend, turn out to be true. It's the same pattern as used on her dad but Harper is determined that the end result will not be the same. She will not fail. She will not fail Will nor will she fail Quinton. She will twist what the Pharaohn expects.

The Characters
Harper Blaine has been aware of the Grey for two years now and has a better understanding of how it works. Chaos is her ferret. Quinton, her DIY expert in pretty much anything and everything and an escapee from the overly regimented NSA is her lover now. He's also working on a ghost detector. Will Novak hasn't been with Harper for a year now and is currently working in London at Sotheby's; his brother Michael is there as well. It's too bad for Will that Alice isn't up on current events.

Edward Kammerling is the head of both the Seattle vampire community and TLP, "one of Seattle's biggest development groups". He has recently been reworking the way he disciplines and rules in Seattle. Bryson Goodall is Edward's head of security. John Purcell is Edward's vampire partner in Clerkenwell in London; Jakob is a river spawn enspelled to serve Purcell. Master Simeon bin Salah is a sorcerer, a very long-lived sorcerer who deals in black magic. Alice Liddell is being used by the Pharaohn the leader of all the Egyptian vampires, the asetem-ankh-astet, stronger than regular vampires. Wygan. The worm-man who tortured her father. Alice had Simeon create the Kreanou, a vampire to end all vampires who will turn on anyone his masters order for as long as they hold his leash.

Part of Harper's past includes her mother...who knew?!! Harper has an awful relationship with her mother, one colored by her own child's perspective on a mother who insisted on Harper pursuing a career as a dancer to fulfill her mother's dreams. One which Harper endures as an adult as her self-absorbed mother continues to nag and criticize. Cary Malloy was both boyfriend and mentor when Harper was first starting out as a detective. Now he's coming back from the dead in Harper's dreams and in a psychic phone call warns her. Of watchers surrounding Harper always. Evil. Now something is breaking and releasing more of this evil. The worm-man of her father's journals. The significance of the drowned Jilly.

Marsden is a very hostile greywalker Harper encounters in London. He believes the best Harper is one no longer in this world. The caryatids at St. Pancras Church are Hope, Charity, Temperance, and Prudence who provide Harper and Marsden with information; their ghostly attendant, Barnaby Smith, is able to provide more details. Henry Glick was the Primate of the Red Brotherhood of St. John--fool. Mrs. Jabril is a steampunk dream!

Sekhmet challenges Harper outside Sotheby's when she comes to check on Will. Technically, on Harper's side, but not a being Harper wants to encounter again. Ben, Mara, and Brian Danziger play a cameo role in this story. Detective Solis is not present.

The Cover
The cover is shades of gray with black and a metallic royal blue with Harper carefully looking back over her shoulder at a crowd of red-eyed, hooded creatures following her on a London street all a'tilt. Naturally, it's night time with a fractured full moon overhead.

The title is curious. The only Vanished I can figure is Harper's dad's ghost. She can't find it in any of the expected places.