Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet by Darynda Jones
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
Sadness! I absolutely loath writing bad reviews.
This book, however does not deserve more then two stars.
The series started with the promise of a PI solving her cases with the help of the deceased. She can see and talk to dead people, because she is a “grim reaper”. Oh! C’est Surprise! This sounds interesting!The first book absolutely delivered and I told everybody to go and get it and read it as fast as they can! The case was great, the writing funny, the heroine engaging.
The second book kept up quite nicely! The talking to dead in order to solve cases lessened a bit, but it was still funny and the case was not bad either. The third book however was a total let-down. Almost no dead people talking, the male antagonist/love interest of Charley (the heroine) was more the focus of the book, the case was shallow and predictable and felt like and afterthought and the sexual tension stretching over almost every page got annoying really fast!
This fourth book follows this new recipe to a T. The sex scenes were less! Yes.One cannot enjoy something, if it is over-done, never mind how hot the guy is!
Charley doesn’t get hired for the case until page 26. The pages up until then are spent rambling on about Charley’s new spending habits while trying to deal with getting tortured in the previous book. We also get introduced to the ghost of Charley’s aunt, who died sometime in the 60′s and well before Charlie was even born, but doesn’t seem to know it until just that scene, when we get to know her! The aunt has nothing to do with the case, or much of anything later in the book. She is not even funny!
This sets the tone for the rest of the book! Disjointed scenes, that have nothing what so ever to do with the plot, the case again is more or less on the fringes and the entire book has more to do with Angles and demons, then with a PI trying to solve her case! One demon attack after another happens. The dead dog and the son of Satan take care of the monsters trying to kill Charley (well, it’s not sexual tension this time, it’s demon attacks! WE GOT IT! SHE IS BEING HUNTED!) For not liking damsels in distress, per her own account a few books ago, Charley is sure giving a great impression of one.
The case Charley was hired to do on page 26 has in it’s entirety maybe 50 pages devoted to it out of 265. You draw your own conclusions from that.
At the end of the book, it is mentioned that Charley solved four cases in one swoop. Hard to believe she did all that just driving around in her car “Misery” recounting what else she named in her life (including her brain and her heart and trying to find a name for her couch).She is starting to sound more like an over the top teenager, then a private investigator with an employee to keep in paychecks.
I wanted to give the book before this one the benefit of the doubt. Seeing where the story is going. Maybe it will snap around and go back to the PI story, that lured me in. But it didn’t. It got worse.
After reading the first two books in the series, I recommended them to a bunch of people as THE great paranormal detective series! Now I have to retract this recommendation, as it is not a detective series, but rather about the war of good vs evil (well at least that is what is being hinted at all the time). If you are into demons and angles, half told stories, disjointed scenes, unimportant characters getting more time than the actual case and a repetitive “THIS GUYS IS SO HOT” , this book might interest you. Otherwise, give it a pass.
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