One Life Left by David Green
Publisher - Eerie River Publishing
Published - Out Now
Price - £11.01 paperback £1.51 Kindle ebook
Nick Holleran’s life in Hell is about to get a whole lot worse.
Failing to learn from his previous escapades, Haven’s one and only Paranormal Detective stumbles through life, and makes deadly enemies in all the wrong places. Implicated in a growing number of murders, Nick scrambles to clear his name and uncover the true culprit, but old habits die hard. Sheltering his girlfriend Rosa, and their ghost ward Diana, from the harsh reality surrounding them, Nick finds himself hunted by an unstoppable creature craving blood and with few allies.
But with reality stranger and vaster than he ever realized, and long-dormant entities on the rise, can Nick Holleran put his past, and his reckless instincts, behind him and carve out a safe existence for himself and those he loves?
It’s the week of Christmas and, with one life left, Nick Holleran’s foes are closing in… And they smell blood.
Horror can be extreme shivers or a mild sense of danger. Sometimes you want to be scared and sometimes just thrilled. Personal preference and your situation may help you pick what you need at the time. David Green’s urban fantasy novel One Life Left is very much at the milder end of horror but for me the exception of the story left me feeling very disappointed.
Nick Holleran died and came back a changed man. He can now see the magical and the dead. He is now in on the secret that world is a level of Hell where that, demons and more reside. He is also a private investigator and his two worlds now collide more than he’d like. Nick is being framed for murder, under watch by the police and for good measure now hounded by a powerful supernatural force. It’s not the best run up to Christmas.
In a very crowded field there isn’t much here that stands out. What I did enjoy was the two parts of Nick’s found family his kind but firm girlfriend Rosa and the petulant teenage Diane who also is a powerful ghost. In a sub genre where women often become either objects of lust or damsels to reduce these actually do feel refreshingly normal characters. They put a Nick in his place.
Otherwise I did not really click with this. As usual Nick is a person narrator in the style of many a private detective and Green makes him come across a mix of anxious and uncomfidamt - often having the same discussions with Rosa about being safe and putting in many a geek reference. He feels very generic to me and I didn’t really care in this story that he was being framed.
The wider world is a not unusual mix of mythologies from demons, fae, the devil and throw in Irish gangsters and Arthurian legends too into the mix. None of these are particularly new takes and unfortunately made me think of stories that have played with these ideas before. The main monster of this book is also a little reminiscent of a famous horror novel. I feel a lot of familiar ground is being trodden and a certain use of language gives the plot away much earlier than Nick appears to realise. The other disappointment is the lack of any feeling of setting. This is set in a fictional Oregon town but for me feels more a place where things happen than a place you can feel come alive.
Overall I found the pacing very slow for what is not actually that long a book. There is a lot of recaps after a few pages that I’ve already read and I just found everything went the way you’d expect. In terms of horror it’s very mild and unlikely to keep you afraid of the dark.
Overall in a very popular and large subgenre there is not enough here that makes the book stand on its own two feet. It’s not going to be a series I will ever revisit. Sadly I cannot recommend it.
