Grave Dance by Kalayna Price

Grave Dance is the second book in the Alex Craft UF series by Kalayna Price.  Here is the blurb.

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.

I‘m not sure what to say about this book, it was good but not great and it has not enthused me enough to review it either positively or negatively.  It is some time since I read Grave Witch the first book in this series and I can’t remember all the details of what happened in it and I so wish I could as I think it would have helped with reading Grave Dance.  Ms Price gives us little snippets of what happened previously but not enough.

The plot is a good who done it and I thought I had the perpetrator all figured out but in the end it turns out I was wrong.  However it takes quite some time to get there and along the way we are given lots of other bits of story that I then forgot about until they came up again and quite frankly it was confusing and didn’t add to the book as a whole for me.  We also spend some time in faerie and I really enjoyed that aspect in an Alice in Wonderland type way.  In fact we learn a lot about the fae in this book as Alex tries to come to terms with the news that she is half fae.  We have all of the same characters from book 1 and Ms Price is trying to introduce the dreaded love triangle with both Falin and Death after Alex.  I ended up routing for both Falin and death as I couldn’t pick a favourite between them but again I don’t think the love triangle added anything to the story.  It wasn’t taken far enough and nothing really happened. 

I thought that this book was lacking something.  It took me longer than normal to finish this but I also am glad that I read it and I have already pre-ordered Grave Memory the next in the series.  I just hope book 3 has more oomph than Grave Dance.  I am going to give Grave Dance 3 stars.