Audiobook Review – Grave Visions (Alex Price, Book 4) by Kaylana Price (3/5 stars)

Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Length: 10 hours and 38 minutes (352 pages)
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Release Date: February 2, 2016
ASIN: B01B1Y7RC2
Stand Alone or Series: 4th book in the Alex Price series
Source: Audiobook from Audible.com
Rating: 3/5 stars

“If you want to hear voices from the dead in Nekros City, you call Alex Craft. She’s a Grave Witch with reasonable rates and extraordinary powers, who specializes in revealing the secrets of the dead. But now she’s the one fighting to keep her own secret. She’s not human—and her newly discovered heritage is causing havoc for her both in the human realm and in Faerie. But her status as an unaffiliated fae also makes her an ideal candidate to investigate a new street drug that has surfaced in several of the spaces between the human and fae worlds.

This glamour-infused drug causes hallucinations that turn real—at least for a while and often with deadly consequences. Searching for the source of this drug—and its purpose—lands Alex front and center in the conflict brewing in Faerie and she must find answers before she’s dragged so deep she loses her freedom.”

This was an okay continuation of the Alex Craft series. I was very excited to read this book since I was loving this series back in 2013 when I read it. Maybe it’s because it’s been so long between books (4 years is an incredibly huge gap between books) but has I had tough time engaging with the story and characters.

I listened to this on audiobook and the audiobook was decent. I am not a huge fan of the narrator’s voice, but she does a good job of distinguishing between characters voices and of conveying emotion, so I don’t really have any strong complaints.

As in previous books Alex continues to run herself ragged; this time her big issue is that she is fading because of not being part of any faerie court (or being declared independent). This leaves her exhausted and sick. Additionally there is a new drug on the streets called Glitter which seems to have it’s origins in faerie and is causing the deaths of a number of humans; so she gets involved in tracking that down.

I just felt like the story was a bit stagnant. Alex finds yet another way to delay making any decisions about her ties to faerie. The love triangle between her, Death, and Falin continues without any progress. Death is in the story only a very small bit and, although Falin is in the story more, Falin and Alex are trying to distance themselves from each other.

The whole plotline of having a faerie drug wreaking havoc in the human world has been done before. The first urban fantasy series that comes to mind is Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series, in that series there is a book about Goblin Fruit being sold as a drug to humans. There are have other urban fantasies that have used similar plotlines as well. The plotline for this book just feels very unoriginal.

Overall it’s an okay book but in the end I just mostly wanted the story to be over. There isn’t a lot of progress made in the over arcing story and the contained mystery Alex is dealing with feels like something I’ve read about many times before. The characters felt stagnant as did the world and story and I had a lot of trouble staying engaged. I have felt like this about a few other urban fantasy series right now (Chicagoland Vampires, Elemental Assassins) which makes me wonder if I am just burnt out on the genre. However I have still been enjoying both the Incryptid series and the October Daye series by Seanan McGuire as well as the Kate Daniels series by Ilona Andrews…so maybe there are just a lot of urban fantasy series that are kind of fizzling right now. I don’t plan on reading anymore of this series because I just don’t care about the world or the characters any more.

This book goes towards the following reading challenges:
– You Read How Many Books? Reading Challenge
– New Release Challenge
– Flights of Fantasy Reading Challenge
– Audiobook Reading Challenge