The Spirit Chaser by Kat Mayor

I have to admit it was a hard slog to get to the end of this book but persevere I did - even if I am not particularly sure that it was worth it.  It started off so well too - we join the Spirit Chasing Team on their last investigation of the season and it is definitely going to give their ratings a boost.  Not only does it give us an introduction to our major character - Austin Cole - but also the lesser background characters on the team (Barrett, Bob, Gary, Thai, Luis and Josie - also confusingly known randomly as JoJo).  It also describes the supernatural events they witness and are subjected too in wonderful detail without going for the schlock angle.  It keeps the momentum going as we are introduced to Casey and accompany her as she moves out to join the Spirit Chasers team.

Then it basically falls off a cliff as the story vacilates between being a love story and a spooky one.  Unfortunately the boy meets girl and they butt heads until they realise that they are meant for each other and then a stupid mis-understanding splits them up and then they reconcile thing really doesn't work within the constraints of the story.  It is nice to have downtime in a book like this - after all you don't want wall to wall things that go bump in the night - but the execution of it just didn't work for me.

Things bump along patchily plotwise for the majority of the book before picking up for the final showdown but Austin and the Team and his demonic stalker.  The atmosphere generated on the page is wonderfully evocative without straying in to overdone hyperbole or needlessly long descriptive passages.  The ending is no real surprise in many ways as the story does prepare you for it but there is something unusual in the author's decision albeit a refreshing unusual.

In short there about 100 pages here that are very, very good (the beginning and the end), the rest of it felt like filler and I found it hard to wade through.  Part of the problem lies in the characters themselves - neither Austin or Casey are particularly likeable and we know so little about the other people that they are literally just names on the page with the odd sentence chucked in from them.  So much so I am amazed I remembered there names at all - maybe I should have given it an an extra star because at least the character names stayed with me?  Nah, that would be generous and that isn't me.

I am vaguely tempted to see how things work out for the team but only very, very vaguely and I can't say I am genuinely tempted to buy the next in the series.