May Suggested Reading: Greywalker by Kat Richardson

The Greywalker novel by Kat Richardson is the first in a series of five books, the latest is due to be released in August 2010, which has a great paranormal detective story.

It tells the story of a private investigator in Seattle, Harper Blaine, who is clinically dead for about two minutes, and after that experience, she develops the ability to interact with the creatures of the Grey.

The Grey is the dimension between the physical and spiritual worlds, in which vampires, witches, ghosts and other magical creatures dwell.

Harper Blaine has to go on with her life though, and she is immediately faced with two cases, one of a missing student, who turns out to be a vampire, and of a mysterious artifact, which is a sort of time bomb. Though she is still groping with this new reality and her abilities, she is the only one who can keep the worst from happening.

The Greywalker is written on a first-person narrative, with terse sentences, but that doesn’t compromise the story, which is very interesting and rich. Kat Richardson’s writing seems to have improved a lot since then, having acquired a more fluid rhythm, as far as the excerpt of the last installment of the Greywalker series shows.

Kat Richardson told in an interview about how she created the character Harper Blaine. She said Harper was originally a male clichéd character of a tough PI with blazing guns, who never complained and never got hurt. She then started a long process of shaping the character into something more believable.

She said: “Making the character female was some immediate relief, but it still had that ‘man with breasts’ problem. The former military or spiritual martial artist trope has been done to death, too, so those were not options for developing the character and breaking her out of the cliché, so I considered the women I knew who were competent and physically tough and drew Harper based on them.

“I let her go ahead and acknowledge her discomforts, but do the job anyhow—just like most of the women I know.” [1]

The author Kat Richardson seems to be a very interesting and unconventional person. She has a degree in Magazine Journalism from California State University, and presently she lives in Seattle with her husband in a sailboat.

She has worked as a writer and editor in the computer industry, and has also written RPGs, film scripts and computer games plots and has experience in theater and music. She is a supporter of the California Ferret Legalization, which aims at making it legal to own ferrets as domestic pets, instead of considering the ownership illegal and the animals as wildlife ones.

About her working process, Kat Richardson said “I'm not a seat-of-the-pants sort of writer. Since the stories are structured like Mysteries, that makes timing and placement of clues very important, so I work out a lot of the details in the outline before I get a lot of the writing done and that eliminates a lot of heavy revision or re-writing later. At least so far it has.” [2]

Check the sites below for more information on the book and the author.

More info:

Barnes & Noble Greywalker Page # Kat Richardson's Site - About Greywalker & About the Author