Bought it on Kindle. It has this interesting Dean Koontz in his prime vibe to it: the prose is lyrical without being flowery and the narrative is making a slow spiral around the unexplained. There is a small town that’s not quite what it seems, and an old woman who minds the dead by performing some sort of special ritual involving hard liquor, and an undertaker. The woman meets a young girl, who seems to be a runaway. The next thing you know, the woman is dead, savagely murdered, and her granddaughter must return to the town.

Okay, I totally think the runaway girl is a zombie but I am about a quarter of the way in, and I am not quite sure where this is going. I can’t describe how cool that is. Normally I nail the plot within the first third of the book; sometimes within the first chapter, and my reading consists of watching the narrative get there. That’s one of the reasons I read romances: I know the couple gets together in the end. Everybody knows it, including the author, who strives to make the journey as thrilling as possible.

But I digress: the slow build of tension in GRAVEMINDER is pulling me through the book at a record pace. I want to know what’s going on, damn it! I could probably invoke friend privilege and get Melissa to tell me, but it’s more fun this way.