SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Grave Reservations by Cherie Priest

 

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Grave Reservations by Cherie Priest: https://t.co/Hip4rWeCr4

Short Review: 7.5 out of 10
1/3

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) December 15, 2021

Short Review (cont): A generally light fun buddy-cop-ish novel featuring Leda, mediocre psychic, helping detective Grady with a cold case that has some connection to the murder of Leda's old fiancé.

Fun, although the chemistry between the leads is weirdly not really there.
2/3

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) December 15, 2021

Grave Reservations is the latest book by author Cherie Priest known in good part for her horror novels, and whom I know mainly from her very fun twitter feed (and her very fun dogs and cat).  Grave Reservations is a change of pace - it's another take on the amateur psychic meets police detective genre, with the story being light and enjoyable even as it deals with murder and a protagonist with tremendous self doubt and some big issues with grief.  It's a short novel, one which a reader can easily finish in one day, which I did.  

And well, Grave Reservations was fun, with a very enjoyable main protagonist and a solid if unspectacular main mystery.  As the beginning of a new series, It certainly has me willing to try another volume, which is really what you hope for.  On the other hand, I was a bit confused as to what it was trying to do with the relationship between the two main protagonists, who didn't really have any significant chemistry whatsoever, and I don't think that was deliberate?  I'll have some more specifics after the jump.  

Note: That as a more or less straight take to some extent of the Buddy Cop genre, this is not a book that questions the integrity of cops or detectives (in Seattle) at all.  

------------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------------
Leda Foley's travel agency business is struggling, and her very minor psychic talent isn't helping all that much.  She may have fun and seem to be improving that talent by performing at Klairvoyant Karaoke - she performs the songs based on her psychic visions of what she senses about her audience - but that doesn't pay the bills, which will soon come due.  And then there's the matter of her fiance's murder, which was never solved, and still haunts her, no matter how much her friend Niki tries to cheer her up.  

But when a psychic hunch makes Leda rebook Seattle detective Grady Merritt's flight - and saves him from a plane disaster, Grady decides that Leda might be the help he was looking for to solve a cold murder case he could never crack.  And so despite Leda warning Grady that her psychic ability has never been more than inconsistent, the two of them begin to work together to see if her hunches can find Grady any new leads to crack the case.  

It's a match that's an odd one from the start - with Grady the serious single father detective and Leda the oddball grief-stricken but quirky psychic - but one that bears more fruit than either could have expected, especially when Grady's cold case starts to show a connection to the murder of Leda's fiance.....
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Grave Reservations may have a classic setup - psychic plus detective solving crimes - but it has a number of differences that prevent it from playing like a typical cop procedural.  For one, while Grady's the straight man of the pair, he's not a dry stick in the mud, and it's he who suggests Leda work with him - and while Leda's the oddball of the duo, she's not some renegade who's going to do things just crazy enough to work.  More specifically, both characters have a certain amount of depth that is a bit different than their usual archetypes, which keeps things fresh - especially Leda, who's the main protagonist of the duo (with Grady getting maybe 1 POV chapter to Leda's 2 or 3).  

Leda is a woman who's sort of lost in what she's doing.  She's trying to make her travel agency work as an independent business, but isn't super great at marketing; nor does she have any professional support.  Her psychic ability is to her mind borderline useless, because outside of her recent volunteer gig doing psychic karaoke at her and Niki's favorite bar, she can't really seem to use it in any particularly useful way, or to really see anything useful - at least not until she inadvertently saves Grady's life, and even there she wonders if she could have used that hunch to save more people than just him.  And she's still grief stricken about her murdered fiancé Tod, keeping a "murder board" of what she knows about his case in a spare room at the bar. 

Which is not to say she's some dour person at all - with her fun friend Niki, she's part of a fun loving duo all the same both at Karaoke and at life, and she's more than a bit quirky and fun (I'm describing this poorly, but you get the idea).  Which in some ways makes her a good contrast with Grady, who's more of a serious detective, trying to get Leda's help without ever breaking the rules or using her on professional time, even as Leda and Niki try to make that more and more difficult by tagging along and not keeping their mouths shut. The two make a fun combination to some extent, and the story works very well with the dialogue and occasional jokes (one about a pet named Princess Pookie just had me dying) even if the mystery itself isn't all THAT interesting.  

The main issue though with this book is that honestly, the two leads don't really have much chemistry together?  I can't tell if the book is trying to set the two up for an eventual romantic relationship, as Leda's fiancé is dead and she can finally move past him now, and Grady is a single dad to a teenage daughter who keeps screwing up at her out of school jobs and causing him headaches, which you would think could lead to that - and there are moments where it seems like the book is trying to set them up as growing to care for one another, like a moment where Grady attends Leda's karaoke and Grady's daughter shows up to watch.  But in between and surrounding these moments are ones in which the two seemingly never share much care for one another except as respectful individuals, and there's no sparks whatsoever between them.  It's very weird, because the book would occasionally seem to be signaling that it's going in that direction and then it doesn't which just threw me very much off - and without such chemistry there really isn't the conflict or intrigue in the pairing to create much drama.  

So in short, Grave Reservations is a fun generally interesting light detective story, with a minor fantasy aspect, which does enough to make me curious to see how a second book would go.  It also does enough to make me confused as to where it's going, which prevents me from being super intrigued, so some mixed feelings here.