Don't Fear This Reaper ... A Grim Reaper's Guide to Catching a Killer (mystery book review)

You can find a Grim Reaper costume in any costume shop, because everyone agrees on what it is—long cape, hood, no face, and a big ole scythe, right?

 But... what if everyone is wrong?

 

What if sometime between the reaper’s first appearance—in the Middle Ages, when the Black Death was the COVID of its day—and now, the whole concept of the grim reaper was... updated?

 

The black-hood-of-death-and-harvesting-tool getup would have to go.

 

Maybe the Grim Reaper 2.0 would look like a regular Joe (or Jane!). Like your neighbor. Your aunt. The muscle-y dude pumping iron at the gym.

 

Debuting author Maxie Dara makes hay* with this idea in her delightfully-creative new mystery, A Grim Reaper’s Guide to Catching a Killer. 

 

 

You probably wouldn’t look twice at Kathy Valence, if you passed her on the street. Just another frumpy, middle-aged, nearly-divorced—and very pregnant—woman... nothing to see here, just move along.

 

But the badge she carefully pins to the collar of her practical blazer every day? That sets her apart... as a licensed agent of S.C.Y.T.H.E. (Secure Collection, Yielding, and Transportation of Human Essences). Kathy’s job is collecting “essences”—the souls of newly-dead people, to you and me—then delivering them to another part of the company that... well, sends them on to whatever “beyond” is.

 

It’s super-secret—and one of the reasons she’s almost-divorced—but her job in S.C.Y.T.H.E.’s Department of Natural Causes is stable and has no surprises. (Plus, it’s the only thing she’s ever been good at, so there’s also that.)

 

Until today... when she gets to the scene of her latest collection, but instead finds only the empty body... no lingering essence, anywhere. 

 

Case Number 057032 was a teenaged boy—someone who died way before his time.

 

It’s the last thing Kathy expected to find (or not find)... and the last thing she needs. It’s her responsibility, though, so she tries to figure out how to track 057032—Conner Ortiz—down.

 

But when she finally finds him, Kathy hits another snag... because Conner refuses to go. 

 

His reason? He doesn’t know how—or who did it—but he knows he was murdered. And that, as far as he’s concerned, just isn’t right.

Kathy agrees with him, in theory.

 

But the clock is ticking--she only has forty-five days to deliver Conner’s essence before the window closes... and after that? He’ll be doomed to being a ghost, forever.

 

It’s going to take every bit of energy the very-pregnant Reaper doesn’t have... along with some help from her friends... and one very unhappy teen spirit... to put things right. 

 

But if there’s one thing Kathy knows, it’s that she can’t bring a new baby into the world, knowing she didn’t do everything she could to help someone else’s kid to peacefully leave it.

 

 

A Grim Reaper’s Guide is without doubt one of the most completely-original things I’ve read in a very long time.

 

Seriously, there is nothing about this book I didn’t love! (Did I know, before I picked it up, that I needed a book about Grim Reapers and souls and... stuff?? Nope, had no clue. But it turns out, I absolutely, positively did.)

 

Kathy is one-hundred-percent believable—I know people just like her. She’s the perfect Had-No-Idea-She-Was-a-Hero-but-Rose-to-the-Task kind of heroine... someone it’s easy to root for, and feel uncomfortable with. (Besides, if you can’t support a heavily-pregnant woman that everybody always overlooks, who can you champion?)

 

Conner is relatable in that Oh-My-God-He’s-so-Obnoxious-(but-Also-He’s-Not-All-Wrong) way common to teenagers. There’s such poignancy to his situation... killed before his real life had even begun, that you can’t help but feel for him. And his relationship with Kathy (or “Grim”, as he calls her)? Spot-on angsty perfection.

 

And then there’s Kathy’s soon-to-be-ex, Simon. I really didn’t want to like this guy—a dumpy little nebbish who would do anything in the world for her—and yet... I couldn’t not like him because of his earnestness, cheerfulness, and blind willingness to do everything she eventually asks him for help with. There are good people in the world, and Simon is one of them.

 

My final thoughts? I laughed... I pondered deep thoughts... and I cried... (in no particular order). This book is absolutely THAT. GOOD. 

 

A Grim Reaper’s Guide to Catching a Killer is gonna stick with me for a long time... and I’ll definitely reread it more than once. (You know, before Ms. Dara writes a sequel, which I am totally here for...)

 

Seriously, folks. Just go get this one, and read it, STAT.

~GlamKitty


 

*That is officially the first—and, I suspect, the last—hay-related joke (pun? Whatever) I’ve ever made. [“Make hay while the sun shines”? Scythe... harvesting straw... oh, never mind.]

Comments

Post a Comment

No ads or shilling, please. And always, always be polite.

Popular posts from this blog

Prowling the Streets in Search of Justice: A SuperHero is Born

Image
Growing up, I idolized Wonder Woman. She had it all--awesome strength and beauty, intelligence and kindness. To me, she was female perfection. Ever practical, I knew I’d never achieve that ideal (she was just fantasy, after all), but following her tireless quest to rid the world of evil and replace it with love and peace allowed me to envision a place and time in which women enjoyed real power and respect (and could fix problems without a lot of senseless bloodshed). It's never all about thrilling feats of derring-do, of course.  There’s a bit of melancholy attached to any superhero story too-- sometimes a sense of loss, and always feelings of loneliness. Nothing comes without a price.  Raymond Benson explores what it would be like to become an all-too-human superhero in his new book, The Black Stiletto . ✒ ~ ✒ ~ ✒ ~ ✒ ~ ✒ Martin Talbot is a just a regular Joe. Ordinary-looking, middle-aged, and divorced (with shared custody of an only daughter), he’s not the sort to inspire...
Read more

Werewolves in London? Try Bloodsuckers Down Under (Aussie urban fantasy/thriller REVIEW)

Image
Aside from a few dozen or so songs--the unremittingly-cheery sort of dreck I can only charitably term “uplifting”--there seems to be something of a universal consensus that life can be pretty awful. Sound overly harsh? Let’s look to some experts then, shall we? Consider that the first of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths is that “life means suffering”. Think back to John Hobbes, who concluded in his 1651 book Leviathan that life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. “ Of course, if you prefer your proof to be of the less-erudite variety, there’s always that late-20th-century classic, “Life sucks, and then you die”. (Lacks a bit in the eloquence department, but it gets the same point across, in inimical Bill-&-Ted fashion.) With such depressing thoughts bearing down on us like so many dark, angry stormclouds--and the fact that most of us have just seen too much bad to fall for the false promises in those sappy songs--it's no wonder a lot of people look for ways to escape t...
Read more

A Nightmare Without End: Abduction & the Long Road Back

Image
Danger takes many forms. Most of us--once we’ve become rather uncomfortably aware of our own mortality--make an effort to take at least a few precautions to ward ourselves from some of the dangers we face.  At a bare minimum, we look both ways before crossing the street. We inoculate ourselves against deadly diseases. We bolt our doors and lock our windows to all the scary things (and bad people) that go bump in the night. We fasten our seat belts before setting out on the roadways in our little hunks of metal (although statistics show that a lot more of us could stand to be doing that ). Taking such measures is empowering; we’re proactively doing something to safeguard ourselves. So many other things, of course, are completely outside the realm of our control. We’re unable to prevent cancers or illnesses that we’re genetically predisposed to getting. We’re at the whims of Mother Nature when it comes to floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, and such. We can’t predict if a random stran...
Read more