Second Grave On The Left By Darynda Jones AOTM BR

**Spoilage**

**Four Stars!**

I'm not quite exactly sure why now, but at the time of reading this, I gave it four stars. I don't particularly remember anything too speshul about Second Grave but.... Yeah. What I do remember is that it was melodramatic. And I really did not get the whole "Hot enough to bake cookies on his abs" thing about Reyes. He was not hot to me. He was not sexy. He was...the anti-sexy.

Kinda like this 

   

He was abrasive, mean, and just....the anti-sexy. *Sigh* I won't make you look at the gif again, but you catch my drift. He was a mountain of dicks throughout the entire damn thing. I wasn't really a big fan of Charley throughout a lot of this either. She swore she knew what was best for Reyes and that he needed his corporeal body and that she'd be able to help him through it....even though he'd expressed how much he'd like the exact opposite.

In the first book, it was announced who Reyes really was and sadly, we didn't get much development on that side of things. Instead we got to search for a missing friend of Cookie's who wasn't actually really missing while a few of said 'missing' woman's friends wake up dead. I forget the plot because it just wasn't that interesting but in the end, someone comes out, a few more someone's die, a couple interesting ghosts move on, actual demons terrorize Reyes's corporeal body and Charley drinks coffee. All. The. Time.

Cookie was a delight, as always. Garret....LAHV him. He's delicious, wrapped in just the right amount of funny, dipped in awesomeness and garnished with badassery. Yes. That's a word.....now. Ubie...as always was just greatness is a bad suit.

The action wasn't lacking but I'm not surprised about that. The forced wit and sarcasm was toned down quite a bit, thankfully and I actually found a person underneath the too-witty jabs and quips. I realized that I quite like who I found - aside from the extremely selfish act she commits at the end of the book - and I've obviously enjoyed this book enough to give it four stars and keep reading. But trust me....book three is where it really starts getting interesting.

Charley Davidson No.1 : First Grave On The Right

**Spoilage**

***Three 1/2 Stars***

Charley is the Grim Reaper. Not one of. THE Grim Reaper. As in, the only. She sees the departed who hang around on Earth with unfinished business and is the portal to the other side in which they pass when they are ready. And she's also a Private Investigator who helps Ubie, aka Uncle Bob solve his cases. 

Charley...what can we say about Charley? Well, Charley has enough personality for six of us and a lot of the time, I wasn't really too fond of it. She was...how do I say this? She was wordy...In a too sarcastic, annoying-piss-me-off kinda way. Like, there was always a wise crack coming out of her mouth. And truth be told, it was not always funny. Alas, I still found her personality likeable.

Which, as evidence of my experience with the Chicagoland Vampire Series, is extremely important. If you can't relate to your MC or you don't like their voice, then reading those books is going to feel like torture. Most of the characters, with the exception of Reyes, were such a delight, I could hardly stand all their awesome. Cookie is just....she's amazeBALLS. Uncle Bob is comedy wrapped in a bad suit. Angel... man, oh, man he's a character. Mr. Wong....he's a little creepy. But not more so than Reyes. The entire role he played in this first book was just....very creepy. I love him now... LOVE. HIM. But I was not loving him at first. Well...the nightly sex dreams weren't terrible, per say...but mostly everything else was. I won't give it away completely...but he was creeptacular.

 
Charley first meets Reyes when she was younger. 15, I think. She and her sister were doing some sort of project for their class; one involving Charley and Gemma to take their asses to the rough part of town and film the goings on of those less fortunate than them. I won't even go into how many ways that was stupid, but we'll press on. In a building nearby their designated hang-out spot, Charley spots a 17 year old Reyes getting his clock cleaned and rewired and she decided to "save" him. Long story short, she throws a brick in the window, he ends up downstairs telling her to leave before she got hurt and he called her Dutch.

Years pass, a trio of lawyers get murdered and the APD are called in to save the day. Charley talks to a few of our dearly departed, helps them pass and learns that she is so much more awesome than she initially thought. And I mean it. She's totally fetch. So...Go read it. Like, now.