Rating: WARTY!
There's something like nine volumes of this series and that's nine too many in my opinion after listening to this first one. I could not make it through this book. This is another book which proves my point that if the things start going south in your read, there's no point whatsoever in gamely reading on in hope that it will get better.
It began with the tired premise that a person who has "died" and recovers (! - which actually means that they never died at all) comes back equipped with psychic powers. When is someone going to subvert that trope? So Harper Blane (I should have quit reading as soon as I read that this was the private detective's name - it sounds like a foot disease!) has this experience and finds she can enter the grey zone (seriously this is the best name you can come up with?) which is the zone between life and death, where ghosts and vampires live. Yes, and werewolves Everything was in here including the kitchen sink, which was more of an off-white zone with rust stains than grey, to be perfectly honest.
Harper is given two cases: one to track down a woman's college-student son, who has apparently disappeared, and the other to locate a pipe organ that was sold and went missing some years ago. Mia Barron doesn't do too bad of a job reading this, but her Irish accent was annoying and her voice for the missing student, Cameron, made him sound like Ash Ketchum from the Pokémon anime cartoons. Ash's real name was actually Satoshi, but why would we in the west respect that?!
I never was a fan of the cartoons. I thought the only purpose Pokémon served was to legitimize cruelty to animals, with these unlicensed and unsupervised jerks capturing critters and making them fight each other for their jailer's personal glory. Ash was supposed to be becoming the best trainer in the world, but he never trained anyone! He just made them fight all the time, and he wouldn't even let them fight in their own particular...(sigh) Concorde, "Idiom, sir?" Yes! That's it! Idiom!
In the real world, dog fighting will get you jail time, but in this world, it makes you famous. I have seen some episodes and for me the duo of Jessie and James were heroically amusing, and Misty was a feisty one, but Ash made me nauseous. I understand that team rocket retired in later episodes and were replaced by a limp facsimile, but to me the whole show was a limp facsimile of the real relationship one can have with a pet. To get back to the review, I found Cameron way more hilarious than I ever found him sad or pitiful precisely because he sounded just like Ash.
Event that I could have contended with, but the story just dragged on and on and on, with the author too frequently giving in to an obsessive details which were simply not interesting. I don't require a writer of sci-fi or fantasy to legitimize their story. they don't have to dome up with convincing explanations for why something works or why this is the way it is. Just tell your story and I'll go along with it. Unless of course, you bog it down in endless ruminations about The Grey as this one did. I was bored witless listening to that mindless drivel, and I took to skipping any tracks that dealt with the minutiae of The Grey, and any tracks that featured the Irish Witch. In the end I decided to skip all the rest of it because it was simply not getting ti done. I can't recommend this one.
