Living with the Dead by Kelley Armstrong

I read this one considerably slower than the others just because of two things:1) a slew of new characters, which I imagine will allow Armstrong to branch off and write a new series, potentially. 2)Creepy cult... humans doing bad things to humans while logically justifying their actions is just disgusting to me, and there was a bit of that in this one.

This novel was slow to start because it is partially set around a new character, Robyn Peltier, who is human. So there is a lot of confusion at first, because she doesn't know what's going on, and nobody wants to tell her. Then there is the parallel storyline about Adele Morrissey, the psycho clairvoyant and the world that she lives in that needed to be explained. More confusion, just because neither of the main characters know what they're doing and assume giant leaps in logic... or not so giant leaps depending on how well you understand the world of the book. Hope and Karl are the only characters who were introduced in previous book. The other series characters are often referred to, but none of them take a significant part in the story.

Living with the Dead primarily involves Robyn, who is falsely accused of murder. Her boss accidentally took a photograph of Adele and a member of the Nast Cabal together, and Adele goes out of her way to destroy the evidence. Adele, who is part of a clairvoyant cult, is trying to break out of the cult and sees joining the Nast Cabal as the ideal way of doing it. However, her mind is so twisted by the life she's lived, that she is a sociopath who manipulates and/or kills everyone who gets in her way... and there are quite a few bodies by the end. Hope and Karl are there to help Robyn, who is Hope's best friend from high school. They do their best to save Robyn, while shielding her from the world she accidentally fell into. Hope is still struggling with her powers, and is getting increasingly powerful. Karl is tagging along to keep Hope safe. By the end of the book, Hope and Karl both realize that she needs space to figure out if she can survive without him, because her demon is not something that he can help control all the time. Dropped in the middle of all this is Detective Finn... a LA homicide detective who starts off in charge of Robyn's case and finds himself knee deep in supernatural shit. Over the course of the book, he learns that his ability to see the dead is a mild version of necromancy, and Robyn's dead husband is following him around to save Robyn from a terrible fate.

Living with the Dead is a bit slow, creepy and not my favorite. But now that we've passed the awkward phase when we first meet new people, I imagine I will quite enjoy her new books about this new set of characters whenever they come out.