Review: Death Warmed Over by Kevin J. Anderson

Death Warmed Over by Kevin J. Anderson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


3.5 stars. A light but entertaining urban fantasy book by Anderson, but it wasn't quite up to par with what I'm used to from him. I'm used to giant scope space operas with multiple points of view and lots of depth and introspection and suspense. This was just pretty cute. From another author I might have thought that he just wanted to capitalize on the urban fantasy craze. But Anderson really does seem to enjoy exploring different genres, he also did the Terra Incognita fantasy series and has edited several anthologies of terrific urban fantasy stories.

In fact, now that I think about it, this fits right into the premise of his Blood Lite anthology series, I guess that's where he got the inspiration: a humorous, slightly dark murder mystery with lots of zombies, witches, vampires, werewolves, mummies (Ramen Ho-Tep was my favorite character), and many more fun "unnatural" people. And it is quite stylized, it isn't like he just wrote some fluff. It reminds me quite a lot of Simon R. Green's Nightside books (Green even did one of the quotes on the back cover), but not quite as flamboyant. They both like to introduce a lot of cases and showcase their little bits of cleverness, whether they're related to the main story or not. Anderson did a better job than Green of working most of the little bits together. It was all pretty cute, somewhat predictible, but full of likable characters with a charming style. I just would have liked to see him do something darker or deeper when he decided to tackle urban fantasy, he could have kept the cool cat detective and creative version of the Big Uneasy, but made it a bit more significant for my taste.



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