Three Days to Dead
by Kelly Meding
Read the paperback
Finished 1/19/2011
From Publishers Weekly
Slain supernatural bounty hunter Evangeline Stone is mysteriously brought back to life in the suicide-scarred body of Chalice Frost in the thrilling opening pages of Meding’s urban fantasy debut. Evy’s fellow hunters, thinking her a traitor, drive her relentlessly through a gritty urban landscape populated by a diverse collection of gargoyles, trolls, gnomes and other strange creatures as she tries to unravel the reasons for her original death, unlikely resurrection and fugitive status. With her would-be lover, Wyatt, and Chalice’s close friend Alex as her only remaining allies, doomed to die again in just three days, Evy is forced to seek assistance among her former informants and enemies. Evy is a distinctive heroine, but explosive action scenes don’t compensate for the muddled mystery, and an unwieldy cast dilutes the impact of her original approach and promising setting. (Dec.)
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Pros – The action starts on the first page.
Cons – Too many creature types and too many characters. It feels like it was aiming to be an epic battle like the Newborn battle in Twilight-Eclipse. But that book was 3rd in the series so you were a lot more invested in the story and you had 1000 or so pages to meet everyone. This book tried to squeeze that amount of investment into 300 pages, and I don’t think it worked.
Overall – The story isn’t bad, I just didn’t care very much about what happened to anyone.
Knit a little, talk a little 