Nora Bird works for S.C.Y.T.H.E. (Secure Collection, Yielding, and Transportation of Human Essences), as someone assigns the actual Reapers to their files. A job that you might think a little strange for a woman who is terrified as death as she is, but at least Nora’s anxiety is secure in the knowledge that she’s doing everything she can to avoid dying. (The question over whether Nora is living or merely existing with this knowledge is not one that ever flashes across her mind.) See, ever since her parents died in an accident when she was six, she’s been obsessed with avoiding risk, and what better place to do that than in the office space of the US’s grim reapers?
Nora is happy in her knowledge of how to safely cheat death, secure in the myriad ways you can kick the bucket (which she is steadfastly avoiding), and mechanically doing her job…until her birthday, when a file crosses her desk with a name she recognizes: Charlie Bird. Her twin brother.
The twins haven’t talked (read: texted) in a year, but Charlie is all Nora has left. Going completely against her quiet, controlled, safe life, Nora steals the file and drags Charlie (and his African Grey Jessica, a parrot with an awful lot to say) on a whirlwind road trip trying to stay one step ahead of his death, and the S.C.Y.T.H.E. agents trying to collect him.
Unfortunately, every time Nora saves him, a new cause of death appears in his file. Someone is determined to take Charlie out, and Nora will have to use everything she’s ever learned about death to discover the culprit.
The carpet of Room 204 had been a different color once, that much was clear. The mystery of which color was one that would require a crack detective team to solve, and even then it was likely to end up as a cold case.
Well, this was unfortunately not as good as A Grim Reaper’s Guide to Catching A Killer, the first in the series. The story wasn’t as engrossing this time around, and at a stretch I would say I liked one of the characters. Most of them are ciphers, albeit rather unlikable ciphers, while Nora is living proof why Brendan Behan said “Others have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis.” She is so terrified of life that Nora is just existing, not living; when Dara says that this book is about anxious people, she really means that it’s obvious Nora Bird does not see a therapist often, otherwise she’d be drugged up the the eyeballs on anti-anxiety meds.
Apparently, he had the furthest to walk, his house an exhausting fifteen-minute journey away, which he emphasized twice. Nora suffocated the urge to make a joke about the Jewish people wandering the desert for forty years without this much kvetching. These were her non-Jewish relatives, she reminded herself; they might not be as used to comedy.
Charlie is the one character that isn’t either anxious or having a non-existent personality; he is someone who understands the phrase “It’s not the years in your life, it’s the life in your years.” The fact that he’s a stereotypical clusterf**k stoner slacker isn’t really even that much of a flaw (though I do wonder how much of his appearance as one is due to the book being entirely from Nora’s POV, and to her people who breathe in public are lackadaisical idiots with death wishes).
The big mystery behind Charlie’s near-death experiences is…well, it is. It is the main focus of the book, it’s what Nora is hyper-fixated on for 95% of the 276 pages, and it’s explained and dealt with in about 10 of them.The secret behind where they take refuge? Nora probably should have stayed there and let Charlie move on, because she certainly fits in there. I love a group of people so cavalier about murder, viewing it all as some kind of inconvenience they have to put up with so as their lives aren’t too shaken up. Never mind that the entire thing opens up more questions then it answers (for example, are we having a unanimous decision in regards to the lack of marriage or moving out, or are those discussions they’re all tabling until a later date?) Or the feeling I have that in attempting to stop Charlie from dying, it’s Nora who drags him into a far more dangerous situation.
Am I sorry I read it? No; it was okay. Will I read the third in the series? Maybe, even if the synopsis does not make it sound like something I’m going to 100% enjoy, though I hope it will surprise me. Mostly I think I’m trying to recapture the enjoyment I had with the first one.
