Review: Walking Dead by C.E. Murphy

Walk­ing Dead by C.E. Mur­phy

My rat­ing: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve enjoyed the oth­er Walk­er Papers nov­els, but Walk­ing Dead def­i­nite­ly showed more depth and matu­ri­ty than the ear­li­er vol­umes. Both the author and her lead char­ac­ter have grown very nice­ly. Joanne is far from per­fect, but she does­n’t make the same mis­takes over and over again, which is a pet peeve of mine and occurs all too often in some oth­er authors’ works. (There’s con­sis­ten­cy, and then there’s refus­ing to learn from mis­takes to the extent that I have to believe that a char­ac­ter is too stu­pid to live.) As for the author, it’s incred­i­bly refresh­ing to read a series that does not fall into the all-too-famil­iar para­nor­mal romance formula!

Anoth­er thing I enjoy about this series is that hero­ine Joanne has a sup­port­ing ensem­ble of friends and cowork­ers who have their own tal­ents and foibles, includ­ing a delight­ful mar­ried cou­ple, a sexy father fig­ure (who isn’t relat­ed to any­one we’ve met so far), and an even sex­i­er boss. This time around we were treat­ed to the return of a char­ac­ter Joanne res­cued in an ear­li­er vol­ume who has grown into some of her own ass-kick­ing abilities.

There is a thread that ties all of the Walk­er Papers togeth­er, but C.E. Mur­phy is keep­ing things fresh enough that I, at least, am not get­ting bored. I would, how­ev­er, cau­tion that this is a series that is best read com­plete­ly and in order. I began read­ing one of the nov­els with­out real­iz­ing that there had been a novel­la pub­lished between it and the pre­vi­ous one, and found myself well and tru­ly con­fused. Walk­ing Dead def­i­nite­ly is not a good start­ing point for the series! While a new read­er would­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly be com­plete­ly lost, she would miss far too many details to get all the juice out of this book.

View all my reviews »