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Kim Harrison’s Dead Witch Walking

posted by Matt Knicl at 11:00 am.

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After researching supernatural romance detective novels for my column in The Buzz, I decided to give some of the books I haven’t yet read a try. So far I had only read all the Anita Blake books.

Rachel Morgan is a different sort of detective. Granted, it’s in the same vein as Anita Blake, and there are some similarities, and as far as the book’s gimmick goes, the differences of this world are more interesting. Instead of having characters operate in the back alleys of our world, the world of The Hollows series is an alternate history where bioengineering accidentally wiped out many humans. With so many mortals missing, the once hidden races, like vampires and leprechauns, now stood out. So instead of an all out war, every species integrated into human society. Of course, not without obstacles.

Rachel Morgan is a cop, or “runner”, of the supernatural populace of Cincinnati, located in the area known as The Hollows. She is a witch and uses charms and other magic spells heightened by channels of supernatural energy called ley lines. She creates her surrogate family (as Anita does) of a vampire, a pixy clan, and two mysterious humans whose pasts can be revealed in other books.

The book took awhile to get into, but once I hit page 150 or so I was in. I like the world Harrison sets up, especially how a prominent feature of the world is the illegality of bio-drugs, which is an aspect of science, not magic.

One of the structural things that took time to get used to, and still bothers me, is the somewhat linear progression of events and how that affected my perception of the world. In Guilty Pleasures, the first Anita Blake book, the mystery is the important thing, and aspects of the plot are juggled throughout the narrative. So A to B to A to C to B. Dead Witch Walking has Rachel go from point A to B to C.

Likewise, in Guilty Pleasures, the narrator (Anita) is a vehicle the reader drives, and as the mystery unfolds, the world is further explained. In Dead Witch Walking, the first 150 pages or so are set up for the world and narrator (Rachel) takes the reader into a mystery once the character is fully established. I prefer hitting the ground running with a detective, learning about them in the process of the detection and in this instance, have the detectives’ movements tour the setting for me. This is personal preference, but technically speaking the novel (DWW) wants you to care more about the narrator than the mystery, which can be a problem. Once the reader sees who the narrator is after a novel or two, shifting the plot to focus more on them is justifiable (as the Anita Blake books do).

All in all though, not a bad read.

Image courtesy HarperCollins

Matt Knicl: My name is Matt Knicl. I'm a U of I alumn and one of those unemployed English majors Garrison Keillor likes to make fun of. I've been reading comics since high school and one day I would like to write them. My goal is to expose readers to what is out there in the world of comics and using my English powers, show what is worth reading or not. I can be reached at buzz.comics@gmail.com.