Kathy Valence is your usual office drone; nondescript, sensibly dressed, no real after-work life and content to keep her life that way. Sure, her job at S.C.Y.T.H.E. (Secure Collection, Yielding, and Transportation of Human Essences), Natural Causes Department means that her job title could loosely be called “Grim Reaper” (actual title being Collector. got to go with the rebranding for a better experience!) but that doesn’t mean she wants excitement. At forty two, several months pregnant and in the midst of divorcing her husband/father of the child, Kathy has all the drama she needs. But when she goes to collect the soul of seventeen year-old Connor Ortiz and finds it missing, only for him to pop up and insist he was murdered, her life might not go the way she wants. With only forty-five days until Connor turns ghost, Kathy will have to rely on her old mentor, her soon to be ex, and even Connor himself if she wants this solved. But with a potential office conspiracy throwing a wrench into everything, this could just cost Kathy her career, not to mention her life.
This is one of those books where the synopsis gives you maybe 85% of what the book is actually about; that’s not a bad thing, nor a good thing, it’s just a thing. From the blurb, I expected Simon (Kathy’s ex) to be a completely different person than he turned out to be; he and Jo (Kathy’s mentor) were exactly what Kathy needed in her life. The four main characters (Kathy, Simon, Jo and Connor) were all realistically written and just all around likable characters. Jo did come across as a slightly more PC version of Blind Al and Nanny Ogg’s love child, and I do question exactly how she was a Collector being blind, but that didn’t detract from the book.
Stu, Kathy’s manager, was a textbook middle management health nut, though the revelation that comes out at Friday bar night about him was slightly pleasant surprise. He did read as “Archangel Gabriel does soul collecting” as played by Jon Hamm.
Kathy, I do have to say, is a touch self-pitying; though I lay that at the feet of her parents. That is the connecting tissue between her and Connor; survivors of emotional abuse from emotionally distant parents can recognize each other. She’s hyper-focused on her body, her fears about motherhood, how she’ll ruin Simon’s life with her Sadim (opposite of Midas) touch and that’s why she’s divorcing him; Kathy’s worst enemy is probably Kathy herself. She is probably the character with the most growth in the book though; she goes from
to
in maybe 150 pages.
Connor just had to maybe learn to trust people more. On the whole, he, Jo and Simon didn’t really have character growth; though I think that’s because they knew who they were at the beginning of the book, so they didn’t have to grow to meet the challenges.
I will say that maybe it’s because I read a lot of Mysteries, but I figured out whodunit within maybe 1 chapter of their appearance; it was one of two people, and once one got crossed off it had to be the other. Didn’t detract from me enjoying the book, it just made me slightly more curious about the “why” and “how” over the “who”. Also, the ending was a tad rushed and slightly “waves hands and things happen to wrap up the plot”. I will still read the sequel when it comes out; I want to see where exactly she can go from here.
(Fun fact; Dead Sparrows, a band mentioned several times in the book, is apparently a real band. I am definitely going to be checking them out to see if they’re as interesting as Maxie makes them out to be.)