dead man's taleRating: 3.25 stars
Buy Link:
Amazon | iBooks | Amazon UK
Length: Novella


Homicide detective Andrew Holden has a high solve rate. Drew’s good at his job, sure, but he also can see and talk to ghosts, which helps immensely. When the newest murder victim has puncture marks on his neck, Drew can’t really believe it would be a vampire.

Detective Sean Farley is a fae, and lead on the supernatural investigations team. He and his team are sent to the small town to figure out if it’s really a vampire who has committed the murder. But also, Sean is tasked with finding out if Drew is a supernatural himself…or if he’s the one killing people.

The two men hit it off, and have a night together. But when Drew ends up at the scene of another murder, Sean takes him off the case. What’s worse, Drew finds out that Sean thinks he might be a murderer. But Drew can’t let it go. And only together can Drew and Sean solve the mystery.

So I was intrigued as soon as I read the blurb, and I was quick to pick this book up. It was a quick read and the first of a series. But I found it to be a bit lacking in the areas that I look for in a paranormal book.

While I liked both Drew and Sean, they were both two dimensional without much development. What you see on the surface is what you get. Drew was a bit more endearing to me, and I loved the way he interreacted with his ghost best friend, Calleigh, but there wasn’t much more to him. Sean was the same. Nice, with some good moments, but not much development. I was definitely looking for more from both the characters, so it was hard to be invested. On top of that, I didn’t really feel the chemistry between them and wasn’t quite sure what they saw in each other. The relationship seemed added on, and I didn’t feel their connection.

So world building in a book like this is key for me and it was decidedly lacking here. Again, everything was just on the surface. I parsed out that the supernatural beings were hidden from the human world, but there wasn’t any information about how they act and react, if there are rules to their culture, who was bad and who was good. What information we do get is just tossed out there with little to no explanation. For a reader like me, this didn’t work. I need more, and need to see these things developed.

I will say that the murderer came as a bit of a surprise, but in a good way, which doesn’t often happen to me. I liked the motive the author attributed to them, and I definitely appreciated that I didn’t see it coming, but that it made perfect sense.

This story is a bare bones world with not enough development to get me to really engage. While an overall nice story, I was looking for more, especially in a book like this.

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