Title: Living With the Dead
Author: Kelley Armstrong.
Page Count/Book Type: 372. Hardback.
Robyn Peltier has never done anything out of the ordinary and she never makes snap decisions. But when her new boss is murdered and she is named the prime suspect, she finds herself way out of her depth. As the bodies pile up, only her best friend Hope Adams, and Hope’s somewhat spooky boyfriend Karl, are on her side.
What Robyn doesn’t realise is that Hope has a few secrets of her own. namely that she’s a half-demon, and her ‘spooky’ boyfriend is actually a werewolf. Robyn has accidentally stumbled into a bloody supernatural turf war, and the only way Hope can keep her friend alive is by letting her enter a world she’s safer knowing nothing about. A world where homicide cops talk to ghosts, defence lawyers are sorcerers and nothing is quite what it seems.
Great read. I don’t think that you necessarily need to have read the rest of the Otherwold books to jump into this one and be engaged by it and that’s the beauty of Robyn, your bog standard, everyday human, being a main character for those who don’t know much or anything about the supernatural world in Armstrong’s books. Having multiple protagonists works so well, I got a lot of the insider jokes from Hope and Karl but had I known nothing about any of the previous works in the series Finn and Robyn would have given me that outsiders view and learning curve that I needed to catch up and still feel engaged and not as if I were missing out on a party. I feel like Armstrong is really propelling the whole Otherworld series somewhere and the last chapter really compounded that for me which left me feeling really exhilarated by the time I closed it. That said, it’s still a great stand alone novel in its own right. As always the pace is great, the dialogue is sharp and clean with enough humour to perk the story up in places and enough drama and action to get your heart beating. Obviously I’m a fan haha, so I’m probably gushing, but I really enjoyed this book.
