Trouble with Twelfth Grave

After a long time away from books – because adulting takes way too much time – it is time to dive back into the world of Charley Davidson, grim reaper and private investigator extraordinaire, in Darynda Jones’ Trouble with Twelfth Grave (which, for some reason, is an incredibly difficult tongue twister for me).

The Trouble with Twelfth Grave: A Novel (Charley Davidson Series) by [Jones, Darynda]

This little nugget came out on Halloween, and I had it pre-ordered on my Nook device so it was there bright and early. And then life happened and I got SUPER busy. So, many of you Charley Davidson fans have probably already read this and I am a few weeks late to the table. But I’m here, and probably in time for desert, which is awesome.

And can we take a minute to talk about how silly the word “twelfth” is? It’s a ridiculous word to spell. The more I type it, the more I think it looks wrong. Twelfth. It’s just so odd.

For those of you not familiar with this world, Charley is *the* grim reaper for our planet/world/universe(?) and a – supposedly – pretty powerful god from somewhere up there. Eons ago, she fell in love with this malevolent god whose name I can’t spell. They “fought” each other for a long time and ultimately were both “born” on Earth as infants with no memories of their prior lives, and they still managed to fall in love on Earth as they had all those eons ago. Still with me? Cool.

Charley is a little prone to unfortunate situations. As in, she gets herself into a pickle and has half-baked ideas on how to get out of them. Her bestie, Cookie – who I love – and her hubby, Reyes (the malevolent god, fyi), her Uncle Robert (who got married to Cookie a few books ago), Garrett (a skip tracer whose trip to hell, courtesy of Reyes, has given him some insight), and Osh (a former demon slave who eats souls) are always there somewhere and generally exist to keep her pumped full of coffee and save her from herself.

You know, as I read my summary above, it sounds like I’m getting frustrated. And yeah, I guess I am.

This Twelfth Grave adventure involves Charley trying to chase down her husband long enough to find a way to kick out the really malevolent part of his psyche before his brother (God) decides to evict him from the planet permanently. She’s also trying to cover up solve the murder of a guy who assaulted one of her friends. So, you know, pickles.

And Reyes is running around, or materializing or dematerializing or whatever it is he does to get from Point A to Point B, seemingly out of control and looking for something very specific. Of course, he’s running around in the mindset of the really malevolent part of himself, which is not super user-friendly. Dead people are showing up and Charley’s crew thinks it’s probably Reyes’ fault. Or his alter ego’s.

Really, this book seems to exist to lay a bunch of groundwork on Reyes’ background and bring more interaction with God and His always-faithful Michael, while revealing only a little about Charley that we didn’t already know. Even the case she’s “working”, which usually has something to do with her character development, had zero to do with the actual storyline except give her a reason to spend loads of time in the car so Reyes could take a nap. It ends – as most of these books do – on a cliffhanger.

Please momentarily close your eyes while I bemoan the ending. And this book. If you’ve read it already and are therefore immune to spoilers, please continue.

<Sigh.> I thought this book was not as good as the last ones. For these keeping score, this series ends with Book 13 (although supposedly some characters will continue in a spinoff), which is due for release October 2018. I felt a little like people sat around saying, “How can we give a bunch of background on the characters that we didn’t want to give earlier because we didn’t want to give too much away too early?” So thus Book 12 was born.

It was still funny in parts, but maybe not as consistently as the previous books have been. I have two words: “Cookie” and “lamp-post”. 

And the ending . . . bummer. Maybe it’s hard to write a lot of different cliffhanger endings. (Of course, the obvious solution could be “omit the cliffhanger just this once”.) I can hear the publishers and editors: we need Charley to get into a pickle in the last sentences of the book, but we really don’t know how she would do that, so maybe we can just rehash the ending from Book 11? Because that’s what I felt happened. Reyes ended the last book going into the god-glass and coming out not quite right. In this book, Charley’s gone off somewhere not quite right with the promise of coming back. It’s just a little too similar, in my opinion.

So, the book was fine. Was the story necessary to get us to Book 13? Probably. Was it the best book of the series? Not by a long shot.

Overall: 7/10

Discussion

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  3. Una
  4. Mel
  5. Val
  6. Uta
  7. Ted
  8. Ara
  9. Rae
  10. Jon
  11. Ivy
  12. Zac
  13. m88
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  15. HCG
  16. Kit
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  19. Rob
  20. fix
  21. Pam

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