Review: Grave Dance by Kalayna Price (Alex Craft #2)

*Mild spoilers ahead!*

Whoever said dead men tell no tales obviously never met Alex Craft.

After a month spent recovering from a vicious fight with a sorcerer, grave witch Alex Craft is ready to get back to solving murders by raising the dead. With her love life in turmoil thanks to the disappearance of Fae Investigation Bureau agent Falin Andrews and a shocking “L” word confession from Death himself, Alex is eager for the distractions of work. But her new case turns out to be a deadly challenge.

The police hire Alex to consult on a particularly strange investigation in the nature preserve south of Nekros City. The strange part: There are no corpses, only fragments of them. A serial killer is potentially on the loose, and Alex has no way to raise a shade without a body, so she’ll have to rely on the magic of others to find leads. But as she begins investigating, a creature born of the darkest magic comes after her. Someone very powerful wants to make sure the only thing she finds is a dead end—her own.

ebook

~ 371 pages

First person, single pov

Yes.
I wouldn't recommend reading this without reading book one.

No.
The story for this book wraps up but the series plot gets ever more intriguing!

Maybe.
Falin vrs Death...
It's not really a contest because Death has little character development but for some strange bloody reason we're expected to care about him... Whatever. Falin is quite clearly end game no matter what shit goes down.

Yeah... Not really violent. More... I dunno. Creepy? You're dealing with body parts and a grave witch.

Grave Dance kicks off about a month or so after the events in book one, Grave Witch.
We find Alex in a much better position than she was at the beginning of book one.
Her business has picked up and she is no longer scraping the bottom of her penny jar in order to feed herself, and her dog, and as well as private clients she still does work for the police which is how Alex is pulled into an investigation featuring many severed feet but no other body parts.

The investigation points towards the fae and this pulls Alex deep into fae politics which is both awesome and problematic in an awesome way.
It's awesome because the world is expanded and new characters emerge. For the first time we see all the potential places this world can go but it's problematic because Alex discovered she is faekin at the end of the previous book and this is going to cause her problems especially with the way things unfold here...
Faekin seem to fall into two categories: Human with some fae blood or Fae with some human blood. It remains to be seen exactly how fae Alex is but from this book I'm willing to be she is more fae than human.
Her powers are expanding, she becomes the unhappy owner of land in faerie, and she's attracting a lot of attention. There will be no way to put the genie back in the bottle and I worry for what this means for her especially since the Winter Queen - the queen Falin serves - seems like a bit of a controlling psycho.

The story moves forward at a steady pace but you wouldn't call it action-packed.
Alex's friends are all present and active in the story and this results in life-altering consequences for one of them.

Death and Falin are around and while Falin's story is progressed and his connection to Alex strengthened, for better or for worse, Death continues to haunt her like a 2D spectre of pointlessness and she continues to moon after him... I'm convinced that Falin is end game and therefore I just can't see why the author is so determined to ram Death down our throats beyond using him as a plot point to open up other planes of existence?

Regardless of Death being annoying, Grave Dance is a strong continuation of the series and I'm eager to read more and see where Ms. Price takes us!

The cover embodies Alex quite well and captures the feel of the series so I quite like it.

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“If you're going to carry a dagger, you need to learn to use it."
I frowned at him. "I know how to use it. I stick the pointy end in things I don't like.”

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