I would like to thank Small Bear Bookd for an advance copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher - Small Bear Books

Published - 1/2

Price - £4.99 eBook

Who do you call when the corpse has died again?

Jocasta Lewis needs a job. What she doesn’t need is undead autopsies, gnome forensics, terrifying monsters, a werewolf with an unhealthy interest in her love life and a police captain who will (literally) lift her off her feet.

Domingo de Torres wants vengeance. And he’s waited a long time for it. An extremely long time. Now it should be simple enough, if it weren’t for vampire murders and immortal weapons getting in the way. Oh, and an ancient collision of sovereignty, power and control. Yeah, that too…

Comedy and fantasy is hard. Yes we can all think of Pratchett but getting the balance between unreality and then making us laugh at it is difficult. The fantasy police procedural is a common place to try to merge our world with a magical one. Adding laughs then is hard and sadly i found the attempt by RJ Eason in The Graveyard Watch to be incredibly disappointing.

Jocasta Lewis is very disappointed to not get her dream pathologist posting but is sent instead to a mysterious unit based under Tower Bridge. It leaks at high tide, her new boss the mysterious Domingo de Torres is keen she works for them but the cases are strange. Men drained of blood art thefts conducted in a minute and her department is ….odd. Jocasta is about to learn the rational world she knows isn’t quite what she thinks.

I’m very sorry to say I was massively underwhelmed by this tale. There is little sense of character across the board. Jocasta feels two dimensional with no real grasp of who she is beyond what is needed for each scene - an issue for her as the entry point into the story. Weirdly she is initially praised more for her forensic skills rather than pathologist ones - especially weirder as the team has a gnome forensics expert too. Its a little laboured in 2024 to have a novelty French accent used for one character while del Torres speaks fluently. The use of metaphors laboured and the plot is not that interesting. Humour I accept is in the eyes of the reader but I found this went for the predictable and unfunny with a strange desire to add a joke to most parts of the description. I couldn’t really get into the story throughout

None of the book appealed to me and I did find it clunky to the extreme. I have no desire to see what happens next and I ultimately cannot recommend to anyone.