Grave Dance takes up shortly after Grave Magic, and Alex is still keeping some parts of what happened hidden from her friends, such as the fact that she opened a magical dark hole in her father’s house. Still, life is mostly back to normal even as Alex tries to figure out her new understanding of her world while also realizing how much she doesn’t know more than ever.
However, it doesn’t take long before she is involved in another incredibly weird case – the morgue has a few left feet in lock up, no bodies to go with them, and she later stumbles upon even more in the wild. They assume that there are dead bodies somewhere to go with these feet but no luck finding them so far. However, the human remains give the Fae Winter Queen an excuse to move against the unallied fae that have been living the woods near the city.
In addition to finding herself pulled into Fae politics, Alex also is being hounded by a rich human leader with a cult like following who knows about the hole she created in the previous novel, and wants her to create one for him whether through payment or other means of persuasion. He believes that humans can gain magical abilities and somehow thinks this would help in his goals.
Despite all these distractions, Alex is focused on finding the murderer. The thing is, Alex doesn’t really strike me as that good of an investigator. Half the things she finds either by stumbling on them or because the enemy targeted her, thus leading her to the answers/even knowing something is going on. As a result, this novel was certainly entertaining but it was also not a very cohesive straight forward plot line. It’s still early enough in the series where it’s more about introducing the wider world for the long term plot so I’m fine with the actual mystery/adventure of the novel being weak as long as the rest of the novel is interesting. Besides, Alex was involved in police work because of her ability to get the unique victim perspective, not because she was a private investigator so her lack of investigative ability makes sense within the context of the novel.
