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    Underground
    Underground
    Underground
    Audiobook11 hours

    Underground

    Written by Kat Richardson

    Narrated by Mia Barron

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The third book in Kat Richardson's best-selling Greywalker series, Underground features heroine Harper Blaine, walker of the shadowy line between the living and the dead. Seattle's homeless are turning up dead and mutilated, and zombies have been seen stalking the Underground. Harper sets out to find the source, and soon comes to realize she's tangling with an ancient evil.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateAug 14, 2009
    ISBN9781440718908
    Underground
    Author

    Kat Richardson

    KAT RICHARDSON is the nationally bestselling author of the Greywalker paranormal detective series and a co-author of the collaborative novel Indigo.

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    Reviews for Underground

    4/5

    254 ratings17 reviews

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    • 4/5
      After every earthquake or anything which disturbs the land, something comes from the underground and starts killing people. Quinton and Harper deal with this new threat together. She is almost never alone in this book. I liked it. She finds out more about him and discovers more than she expected about Albert.
      Will is gone (I hope for good)-that alone deserves at least half a star. He is a wimp. Such character is so unnecessary in an urban fantasy even if there is need for romance.
    • 4/5
      An excellently paced paranormal romp through Seattle's underground. Very nice. This series keeps getting better, but I'm not at all sure how much longer the character can survive the adventures she gets into.
    • 3/5
      Blaine died for two minutes and came back with the ability to see into a dimension called the "Grey". In it she can see ghost, vampires, lines of power and things that go bump in the night. Being a PI means that some of these 'things' ask her for help or let he help where others cannot. Around Pioneer Square in Seattle parts of bodies and bodies without parts begin showing up. The problem is that the parts that are missing look like they've been chewed off and there's little blood. Also some new types of Zombies are showing up in the area. Got that. Shocking revelations, intense suspense, unique paranormal characters, and a mystery that keeps you guessing gives this urban fantasy more than its share of fun thrills.
    • 3/5
      I didn't like this one as much as the first two in the series. It wasn't the writing, it was the story line. I guess I don't like monsters as much as ghosts and vampires.
    • 5/5
      Richardson continues to offer excellent and creative urban fantasy. This installment delves further into Seattle's strange-yet-factual history, including using part of the underground part of the old city as its setting for Native American monsters and zombies.

      When the downtown burned in 1889, the decision was made to raise the streets above the high tide mark and construct the new buildings out of non-flammable materials. For a while, sidewalks were on the old city level as the new streets were filled in and constructed. This is where much of the homeless population lives in this book, and they are being eaten and occasionally reanimated as ambulatory corpses. Fun for all involved.

      We also get more information on Quinton, who continues to be an excellent character successfully breaking conventional molds of masculinity by trusting Harper to handle herself. And she does, without pulling a TSTL (too stupid to live).

      I have an admitted soft spot for Ben's role in this novel, as his linguistic knowledge is put to crucial use. But then, most humanities scholars I know want to believe that what we do is important and practical. We make good cases for it, in fact; but I do like seeing things like fluency in multiple languages being a tool for fighting evil.

      As in earlier books, Richardson continues to explore the effects of power in human hands, drawing on the UF genre convention that mundane every day humans are perfectly capable of being far more monstrous than the more visible monsters (shall we say differently human?).

      I still like her incorporation, or reliance on, general physics for her principles of magic use. Like the Dresden Files, there are rules that govern magic as a force that also limit how fast something can heat up, or how the force to move something is generated; equal and opposite reaction and all that. I feel like Richardson draws more heavily on physics than Butcher does, however, and find myself interested in her innovation of and deviance from those physics.

      In all, an excellent book that fully lives up to the promise of the first two. It is macabre, gothic, funny, smart and creatively epic. Still loving Richardson.
    • 4/5
      Not the best book, a bit over the top. I hope it is not a shark-jump because it has potential. I think the author suffers from what I call the "Hollywood-syndrome" that every book/movie needs more effects and bigger explosions at the cost of actual world-building/expansion/deepening plot/character development.
    • 4/5
      Much improved over the first book in the series. Fun junk food for the brain :)
    • 3/5
      Significantly improved from the previous book. I'm thinking maybe a new editor? Whatever it was, bravo. The story was tighter, the extraneous exposition was cut down dramatically. Still some unnecessary detail (yes, I get that she has a bad knee, no need to mention it every single time she stands up, walks, etc.) but much better.
    • 4/5
      talksupe.blogspot.comtechnically a 3.5This series is getting more interesting by the book! If you started with Greywalker and decided to drop it, I STRONGLY URGE you to pick up the book once again and proceed with the series. It just gets better and better and I guess she is taking notes from her buddy Charlaine Harris. So aside from Harper's budding personal life, I'm now excited to ride the Kat Richardson train and take more adventurous supernatural trips on the streets of Seattle.
    • 4/5
      Another solid installment in the Greywalker series. The best part about this book is that much of it takes place in Seattle’s underground, the tunnels and old sidewalks below the modern city. I greatly enjoyed learning about the underground’s sordid history, and I can’t think of a better setting for a creepy tale about ghosts, murder, and monsters. I also liked the character development, the heart-pounding action sequences, and the nuggets of romance. Overall, Underground is a good mystery, on par with the first two installments, and I’m looking forward to reading the next book, Vanished.
    • 5/5
      This is the third book in the Greywalker series, and in it Harper responds to Quinton's request for help in investigating the disappearance and murder of several of his acquaintances.The Greywalker series is based on the interesting premise that there is a world parallel to ours; this world is called the Grey, and it is populated by ghosts and other supernatural creatures. The Grey is layered with slices of time, in which old buildings exist and ghosts act out parts of their previous lives. Most people cannot see the Grey, though some people can communicate with inhabitants of the Grey. Enter our heroine, Harper. She is a detective in Seattle who is attacked and dies for a few minutes before being revived. Afterward, she is able to see into the Grey and is called a Greywalker. Harper is helped by Quinton, an off-the-grid technician, and Ben and Mara Danziger, who study the Grey and help her understand what she is seeing and experiencing. This story was full of action. It was fascinating to learn the post-flood history of Seattle and some of the Indian folklore. Harper's relationships continue to change as she becomes more involved in the Grey and her life gets more complicated. Well worth reading.
    • 4/5
      Underground is the third in Kat Richardson’s Greywalker series, which features Harper Blaine as a Seattle private investigator who can see the “Grey” – the borderland between reality and magic, life and death, past and present. Harper gained this ability when she died for two minutes in an attack by the subject of an investigation. Underground starts so slowly that I feared that Richardson had lost her way. It’s difficult to imagine that a hard-working private investigator with plenty of work would dive into a case with no client, especially one that, like this one, poses considerable risk of physical harm to an already physically overstressed body. Yet not once in the course of the book does Harper even mention that a paying client or two is paying second fiddle to her quest to find a monster in the depths of Seattle in order to save the lives of the homeless. It’s a noble quest, no question, but wouldn’t one have a second thought or two about leaving this particular investigation to the authorities?Despite the practical problems, though, the book really gets going about halfway through. Richardson has clearly done her homework about underground Seattle, Seattle history, and Native American mythology, and her research is evident on every page. I love a book that can teach me something about a monster with the unlikely (and oddly funny) name of Sisiutl, and how this Native American myth ties in with other traditions around the world. And I enjoyed learning about how Seattle had to be raised – the whole darn city, apparently – in order to avoid the effects of the tides. The sidewalks remained below for a considerable time, leaving pedestrians with the choice of climbing ladders to get to where they needed to be – and often leading to deadly falls if one slipped in the rain. Richardson isn’t the type of writer who feels the need to give you every fact she picks up in the course of her research; she uses her information with a good deal of art, only once resorting to a straightforward infodump by having her protagonist join a tour of underground Seattle.Harper’s romantic entanglements get more interesting here, too. I appreciated the reality of her relationship with Will, painful as it was for Harper, and got a kick out of everything new we learn about Quinton, her security expert. Richardson clearly knows how to put together a series: there are a few subtle set-ups for the next book in the course of these relationships, as well as in Harper’s ongoing friendship with Ben and Mara Danziger and their pet ghost, Albert. It’s a good cast of characters, and one that should provide Richardson with plenty of fodder for additional entries in her series.What especiallymakes this novel sing in its second half is its incredible sense of place. This seems to be true of some of the best urban fantasy out there these days: Seanan McGuire writes about San Francisco and environs in her October Daye series, while M.L.N. Hanover wrote convincingly of post-Katrina New Orleans in Darker Angels. Richardson tops them both with her detailed writing about Seattle’s past and present and its many different sorts of inhabitants. I’m already eager to read the next in the series, Vanished, which will take Harper Blaine to England, a place redolent with history.
    • 4/5
      This is the third book in the Greywalker series by Kat Richardson. The 4th book, Vanished, had already been released and the 5th book, Labyrinth, is due out August 2010. There are six books under contract for this series last that I heard. I enjoyed this book and thought it was a good addition to the series. I listened to this on audio book. The audio book was fairly well done, sometimes the narrator has trouble distinguishing the different male voices, but other than that it was easy to listen to.In this book Quentin contacts Harper about some weirdness happening in Seattle's Underground. Homeless people are going missing and are found dead. Even creepier, body parts have been found in the Underground and the occasional zombie has been seen wandering around. The weather has been strangely cold and wintery; Harper needs to figure out how this is all connected and find out if it is a threat to Seattle. This time the vampires bow out of helping; but luckily Harper has the very resourceful Quentin at her side.As mentioned in previous reviews for this series, these books are mysteries with a paranormal bent to them. There isn't much romance, there is some action, but most of the book is focused on solving the case through investigative work. I again enjoyed Harper's analytical mind and practicality in getting the case solved. It was wonderful to learn some of Quentin's secrets too. He is a great character and I enjoyed having him play such a big role in this story.As with previous books Richardson really does her research and gives us extensive detail on both the Underground of Seattle and the history of the Native Americans of that area. I enjoy this detail, but I could understand how some people might find it cumbersome. So again, if you have read previous books you are familiar with this, Richardson goes into great detail on things and I really enjoyed learning about them.Harper does a great job incorporating the skills she has learned as a Greywalker in previous books to help solve her current case. It was nice to see Harper making use of all that she had learned. Additionally she again learns some new things about her power as a Greywalker. The overall story is nicely summed up, as it has been with each book in this series. I am really enjoying this series. The books aren't incredibly exceptional but they are very well done and make for enjoyable reads. I love trying to race Harper to the conclusion of the mystery. Richardson does an excellent job summing things up and at the end of this book there is a little teaser to what the next book is going to be about.Overall this has been an excellent series and this book was no exception to that. I look forward to reading the 4th book, Vanished, in this series.
    • 3/5
      Harper Blaine is the stereotypical hard-boiled detective, and in the opening chapter of the first book Greywalker she is viciously assaulted by someone she's been investigating and is clinically dead for about seven minutes. When she recovers, nothing is the same. She sees things that aren't there, she's propelled into some sort of misty, dark otherwhere, she's seeing the things that go bump in the night. In effect, that misty borderland between the natural and the supernatural is called the Grey and she now has a permanent passport to travel there. There's no going back to regular life.All of these stories are essentially fast-paced action movies on paper. While all of the characters are distinctive, all are without depth, including the protagonist herself. This isn't really a series about personal growth, simply the growth of supernatural superpowers. Which is a shame, because so many of these characters have potential. And the romantic subplots--are there to add the mandatory sprinkling of spice, not depth.*SPOILERS* Underground involves zombies. At the beginning of the book, Will is back in Seattle trying to make a go of it with Harper, but when she deconstructs the undead he freaks. End romance, exit stage right. Harper cries. Enter Quinton for instant rebound, better than ever. And now we learn that Quinton is homeless by choice, and that whatever is creating the zombies is preying on the homeless living in the historic underground part of Seattle. Why would someone so smart and capable as Quinton be homeless under the government radar? Because the government is looking for him, silly. Enter the NSA. Of course, Quinton is just like Mel Gibson in conspiracy theory, but not schizophrenic. So the sex is great, he totally understands her freaky situation, BUT THEY CAN NEVER BE TOGETHER because the government will never stop looking, even if he fakes his own death. Oh yeah, cause of zombies--local Native American legend. Once again, it's nice that she's not relying strictly on European models and that she recognizes that there was a long human history in the area before European settlement and the establishment of a city.So what do I like about the stories? She does her homework and does a good job with the scenery and exposition to give readers a feel for the locales. She has a fair sprinkling of different cultures and racial groups--detective Solis is a Colombian by birth, then there's the Jamaican Mason family, the various Native Americans who show up in Underground. Harper owns a ferret. She does a great job portraying ferrets as pets, and it is certainly a nice change from all of the cat owners in mysteries.What don't I like? The characters are shuffled in and out of stories with no real pacing or development, just sudden left turns and departures. Each story is entirely crisis management, there's no sense that Harper has anything approaching a normal routine, even if the normal has been redefined. Never any visits with friends or plans for a restful weekend or calls from annoying relatives. So the characters are essentially cardboard cutouts that are moved around the board as needed without any sort of convincing motivation or sense of inevitability.And most commonly, Harper's reactions to the Grey and to vampires and to whatever else is nausea. But boy, she keeps trooping right along with the nausea and other physical discomforts. As someone who's gone through chemotherapy, it's kind of disturbing to have nausea tossed in there as the most common physical symptom Harper contends with, and yet she just shrugs it off. Shit, there's whole suites of pharmaceuticals and endless brochures and books of advice for how to cope with nausea, which can be quite debilitating, and continue to get vital nutrients and survive. I don't think the author has any grasp of it, really, and every time I read about the nausea in the story it makes my guts twinge.Similarly, her interactions with the vampires. She has profound physical reactions to them, admits they scare the pants off her, but then she just blithely handles them. Once again, doesn't convince me. And as a friend pointed out, they have such prosaic names: Edward, Carlos, Alice, Gwen, and so on.So if you want quick entertainment that will occupy you for a few hours, with characters you aren't really going to become attached to, this is the series. It's kinda like the John Grisham of urban fantasy. Kat Richardson is certainly better than some others I've read in this style. I'm not going to go out and buy any of these books though, and I'm returning the ones I borrowed.
    • 5/5
      I just finished "Underground". This is Kat Richardson's third novel of her 'Greywalker' series and I love it! Her heroine reminds me a bit of Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake...without the sexcapades...or the guilt...or the constant killing. Ok, maybe not Anita Blake. Richardson's heroine is a strong character who wrestles with her choices while always trying to do the right thing...even when it's not the most comfortable thing.Harper died...for about two minutes. When she came 'back', she came back with the ability to see what she calls the Grey, that realm between the worlds where time and space aren't quite the same. She also has the ability to 'slide into' the Grey...where she can see ghosts and the past overlaid on the present, and magic and energies have color and weight...very hard to describe, but very well done! In the first book "Greywalker", Harper tries to find out why the world is now so different to her, and how she can come to grips with what's happened to her. The second book "Poltergeist" had Harper learning a bit more about her abilities and the 'rules' of the Grey and it's also where Harper finds out there are more creatures 'living' in both worlds than she ever knew! Each book has a mystery and Harper earns her living as a private investigator, so by now we know that when a 'case' gets dropped in Harper's lap, there's going to be something a big, or a lot, strange about it.This time something is killing the homeless in Seattle's Underground. When her friend Quinn worries that he may be connected to the case, he asks Harper for her help. What these two find out while investigating isn't pretty, but it IS pretty darn dangerous. Harper also has to deal with a few vampires, a witch or two, some necromancers, ghosts galore, creatures from Native American folklore, and her boyfriend who knows nothing about Harper's 'other' life...and doesn't want to.This series has sucked me in but good. As soon as I pick up the new book I'm out of touch with this world until I finish. Harper is someone I'd like to have a beer with...as long as she assured me there weren't any unseen things hanging about! If you like fantasy, give Harper a shot. The first two books are in paperback, but this one is only available in hardcover. I have all three on my 'keeper' shelf!
    • 4/5
      Third in Richardson's Greywalker sereis. It is a good read, though I didn't find it as compelling as the first two in the series. It is set in Underground Seattle, which is almost wholly closed off, but in the book, an interesting area inhabited by the homeless. The story also has great detail on legends of the Northwest Indians.
    • 5/5
      Kat Richardson is one of the best of the urban fantasy authors I have recently started reading. Underground is the third in her superb Greywalker series, and they just keep getting better. Haper Blaine is a private eye, that didn't change after she spent a few minutes dead, but her cases did. She came back a little different, able to see and work within the Grey between our world and the supernatural. In this third outing zombies are wandeing about in pioneer square, and that's not the worst of it. We also learn a great deal more about Harper's friend Quentin. some of the character that played a large role in the first two books take a back seat int his one, although they are not forgotten or pused aside completely. Richardson as always strikes a wonderful balance and keeps you wanting more.