Each month beginning March 1st, 2012, challenge members will read or re-read the title for that month. In addition, challenge members will either post a review, their reading experience, character castings or anything else related to that title. You have freedom to have fun with your monthly post so be creative! Seeing as this series is 13 novels long, this challenge will last 13 months.

As this challenge started in March 2012 and it is already February 2013, you can tell that I am a little behind…

Living with the Dead by Kelley Armstrong (UK cover)

Living with the Dead (Women of the Otherworld #9)
by Kelley Armstrong

Published: 6th November 2008

Robyn Peltier has never done anything out of the ordinary and she never makes snap decisions. But when her new boss is murdered and she is named prime suspect, she finds herself way out of her depth. As the bodies pile up, only her best friend Hope Adams, and Hope’s somewhat spooky boyfriend Karl, are on her side.

What Robyn doesn’t realise is that Hope has a few secrets of her own. Namely that she is a half-demon, and her ‘spooky’ boyfriend is actually a werewolf. Robyn has accidentally stumbled into a bloody supernatural turf war, and the only way Hope can keep her friend alive is by letting her enter a world she’s safer knowing nothing about. A world where homicide cops talk to ghosts, defence lawyers are sorcerers and nothing is quite what it seems . . .

As with previous Women of the Otherworld Challenge posts this is not going to be a “normal” review.

Living with the Dead is actually a really interesting addition to the Women of the Otherworld collection because Robyn is the first and only (I think) human who is a major character in one of the books. She is linked to the supernatural through her friendship with Hope, but as she has no direct connection I think she’s an interesting choice by Armstrong. Because of this, Living Dead has multiple narrators – one is, in fact Robyn herself. I really enjoyed the way the supernatural and the mundane crossed in this book.

The plot of Living with the Dead is an interesting and complex one. It is the first one where we start to see Armstrong build up towards the endgame of the series, though at this point there are only little hints: Hope’s thoughts at the end of the book are especially interesting. I really enjoyed the way that Armstrong wove the different narrators and the threads that involved them together to make a cohesive whole.