First Grave on the Right by Darynda Jones
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The story
First Grave on the Right is the smashing, award-winning debut novel that introduces Charley Davidson: part-time private investigator and full-time Grim Reaper.
Charley sees dead people. That’s right, she sees dead people. And it’s her job to convince them to “go into the light.” But when these very dead people have died under less than ideal circumstances (i.e., murder), sometimes they want Charley to bring the bad guys to justice. Complicating matters are the intensely hot dreams she’s been having about an Entity who has been following her all her life…and it turns out he might not be dead after all. In fact, he might be something else entirely.
This is a thrilling debut novel from Darynda Jones, an exciting newcomer to the world of paranormal romantic suspense.
First Grave on the Right is the winner of the 2012 Rita Award for Best First Book.
My take on it
So finished the book yesterday and had to get the next one right away. I feel a bit conflicted as to how well I liked it. On the one hand, it seemed to be shallow in parts where the author could have gone into more depth but on the other hand, it read really really fast because of it. I liked the level of excitement, I certainly didn’t get bored at any stage.
Not sure if this is a spoiler so I’ll use the tag just to be on the safe side 🙂
Thankfully the sex scenes were steamy rather than embarrassing. That’s always a huge problem for me when sex scenes are so cliche that I feel like face-palming myself. Shudder. I don’t like to fall out of my reading zone because the author screwed up a sex scene, I’d rather it weren’t there at all 🙂
I loved Reyes. At times it felt like he was a bit of an excuse to get Charley out of a tight spot, but I have a soft spot for hot tall mysterious strangers.
The dead characters are fascinating. I always like having well fleshed-out secondary characters and some of them are hilarious.
So all in all, I really enjoyed the read. It was fast and furious, funny and sexy and so far, the second book is equally good.
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