Living with the Dead: Women of the Otherworld [Paperback]

Kelley Armstrong is one of my favorite authors. But "Living with the Dead" makes me wonder if her series has jumped the shark. Too many characters. Too many shifting P.O.V.S. Too much confusion all around. I like twists and turns, but I found myself working too hard to keep up for too little pay off in the end.

I liked the Robyn character and thought her plight was well written, but I didn't feel like I got to know her well enough because just when things got juicy, we were shuttled off into someone else's mind. I also missed the sensuality of the earlier novels in this series. I'll certainly try Ms. Armstrong's next story, but I hope the author returns to using only one or two POVs per story and focuses on a strong but understandable plot.

I have been a Kelley Armstrong fan for years and always finish the newest book looking forward to the next one. Her characters are interesting, quirky, and believable and her plotting is strong. While followers of her series will enjoy the book, with its focus on Hope and Karl, I wouldn't recommend it to new readers.

The multiple points of view aren't entirely successful, the villian isn't entirely believable in her own voice (this would be an instance where distance would have been a better choice) and there are too many characters who tell rather than show. Finally, while I appreciate an author who can disorient me with unexpected but entirely plausible last minute characters, it works better if keeping the reader off balance is part of the complete reading experience rather than a one-off.

This is not a bad book at all, but any of the other Women of the Otherworld books would be a better entry point for this series.

Well ... almost, anyway. Although she doesn't quite reach the heights of her earlier work, Armstrong's latest instalment in the "Women of the Otherworld" series is much more gripping and entertaining read than its predecessor(Personal Demon), with more interesting and varied characters. As always, it's beautifully written too.

I'm not going to attempt to provide a plot summary here, at the risk of giving away too much - it's quite intricate, and it appears other reviewers have done a much better job than I could in that respect! There is less eroticism in this novel than previous novels, but a lot of action makes up for that; while I have no issue with eroticism in novels, too often it's overdone, and in my view wouldn't have fitted in too well with the plot and structure of this particular story.

This is the first of the series, if I recall correctly, in which the story is told in the third person, from a greater variety of perspectives; in the main, this narrative choice is successful, though it might have been better had the points of view been limited to three or at most four characters. I have to agree with a previous reviewer that there is a little too much telling rather than showing, but it's not excessive. The ending also felt a bit rushed, as though the book had suddenly run out of steam in the last 20-odd pages.

The new characters - such as Robyn, the very human PR agent who unwittingly becomes a murder suspect, and Finn, the copper with an unusual gift - are engaging (though Robyn's habit of making Spectacularly Stupid Decisions got a touch frustrating after a while), and I'd like to see Finn, at least, make an appearance in later novels. I also found myself warming much more to Hope and Karl this time around, although I still don't find them quite as fascinating as Elena and Clay, or Paige and Lucas, for example; Hope's perspective, to me, is the least interesting, and I just don't buy her romance with Karl at all. He does not have the depth of the other werewolf characters such as Clay or Jeremy, and I struggle to care much about either of them.

I suspect the WoTO series is probably due for a bit of a rest - certainly Hope and Karl are, being the least appealing of Armstrong's supernatural characters - as the later novels have not been quite as strong as the earlier ones. Nonetheless, Living with the Dead is definitely worth reading and highly enjoyable. For those new to the series, though, I'd strongly advise starting with Book 1 (Bitten) first, and working your way through chronologically; the books can theoretically stand alone, but make much more sense when read in order.