Urban Shaman (Walker Papers #1) by C.E. Murphy

  

My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Content: Strong Language

 

Joanne Walker has three days to learn to use her shamanic powers and save the world from the unleashed Wild Hunt.

No worries. No pressure. Never mind the lack of sleep, the perplexing new talent for healing herself from fatal wounds, or the cryptic, talking coyote who appears in her dreams.

And if all that's not bad enough, in the three years Joanne's been a cop, she's never seen a dead body—but she's just come across her second in three days.

It's been a bitch of a week.

And it isn't over yet.

I'm always looking for urban fantasies to read and I've had this one on my Kindle for a long time. I was excited to finally get to it, but it ended up being a let down. My biggest problem with the book is that the main character seemed all over the place. It felt like the author didn't know exactly what she wanted her to be and she ended up trying to make her both things and it didn't work for me. On one hand she is a part of the police force, but she isn't really a police officer, she fixes their cars. Huh?? This really didn't make sense to me. She went to college and studied criminal justice, but she really wanted to be a mechanic. Why would anyone who wants to be a mechanic waste their time studying criminal justice if that's not what they want to do? They aren't even remotely related to each other. Obviously she also trained to become a mechanic at some point. I can't remember what the book says about this anymore, and it's not worth going and looking it up at this point. On top of all that she has these latent Shaman powers that begin to manifest, and she has to learn to use them.  

I also felt like Joanne did some stupid things from time to time in the book. I won't go into what they all were, but trusting some guy that drives a cab as much as she did was the first one. Don't get me wrong I like Gary. I thought he was a good character, but it just didn't make sense to me that she would have trusted a complete stranger as much as she did, and it didn't make sense to me that he would have taken the amount of interest in her life from the get-go that he did either. 

Then there was the complete lack of romantic chemistry with the one guy it seems the book may have been hinting at a possible future relationship with. He just wasn't all that interesting to me. In fact he came off as way too gruff and I would have a hard time seeing them together. I did appreciate that this is a straight up urban fantasy without any PNR elements, but I would have liked for there to have been at least a hint of an acceptable romantic partner in the book.

To go along with all those problems I had with the book, I felt that overall the whole thing was just kind of bland. From the plot to the characters, nothing really stood out to me and made me feel like this was special enough to keep reading the whole series.