From the moment the main character wakes up on a slab in the morgue, Three Days to Dead by Kelly Meding had me hooked.
Evy Stone, a hunter of Dregs (nonhuman species like goblins, vampires, and weres), has been resurrected into a new body and has three days to figure out who killed her and why. She has no hope of living past the time limit, but she’s still intent on saving her city from the potentially horrific results of a planned alliance between the goblins and vampires. Not only that, she wants to figure out who killed the other two members of her Triad and framed her for their murders. With the help of the only person she can trust, her Triad’s former handler, Wyatt, she follows a trail of lies and deception to the truth, which is worse than anyone thought.
It’s a strange thing to play detective in your own life, but Evy’s reactions to her discoveries were well-balanced emotionally. Part of her is intent on solving the mystery, reacting to challenges as decisively as any kick-ass urban fantasy heroine, while another part is sometimes overcome by the betrayals and painful memories she discovers. These occasional reminders of Evy’s human vulnerabilities only increased my admiration for her courage and made me want to find out who had killed her and why. Helping the reader connect to Evy’s previous life are the vivid portrayals of human and Dreg minor characters, both allies and enemies. While the sheer variety of Dreg species were sometimes hard to keep track of, I appreciated the blending of traditional and fresh depictions of these fantasy staples.
With only three days to live, the story moves fast from the moment Evy wakes, the short time she has left emphasized by the countdown at the beginning of each chapter. So at first the romance subplot threw me off, as it seemed like too much of a distraction considering everything else Evy had to do in those three days. But the characters and their interactions were so real that I believed in their relationship with the help of some flashbacks that gave me a good sense of their prior friendship.
One of my favorite parts of this book was watching how Evy adapts to her new body. At first she flounders a bit with physical skills she’d been proficient with in her old life, and later she discovers her new body has some different feelings and abilities, which also take some getting used to. I liked this touch of realism and the accompanying entanglements of the life of the woman who had previously owned Evy’s body.
Three Days to Dead is very tightly plotted, with all the clues, whether they prove true or false, clicking together in a puzzle picture that grows clearer as the story progresses. Reading with my skeptical writer brain, I expected to find a few threads left unresolved, but everything wrapped up in a tight, satisfying way. It’s quite a feat to cram that much story into 72 hours, but I believed it was true to the way smart, determined Evy Stone would have lived, both before and after her death.
I haven’t read much urban fantasy beyond Jim Butcher and Laurel K. Hamilton, butThree Days to Dead makes me think I need to read more widely in the genre. It’s a definite keeper, and I’m certainly looking forward to Meding’s next book, As Lie the Dead, out in summer 2010.
