Jamie's Reviews > Graveyard Shift

I guess I'm going to be the outlier here because I found this one to be kind of “meh.” I mean, it was okay and I found the individual chapters enjoyable, but there just wasn't enough of them to make an entire story. This is a very superficial tale with no real depth to the plot line or characters – it kind of reminded me of a dog-less Scooby Doo episode for adults, except for with way less action than the cartoons. If it had been longer and more fully fleshed out, I'm pretty sure I would have loved it. Insomniacs in a spooky graveyard are right up my alley!

But, yeah … what is the gravedigger doing in the graveyard so late at night? There's a tremendous sense of foreboding as our sleuths follow him around and you keep expecting something horrifying to happen, but then they move on to the next part of their investigation and it just kind of fizzles out. “Ooh, we discovered this crazy thing is happening in a totally mundane way! Anyway, let's eat breakfast burritos.” (This might be a slight oversimplification, but still.)

Despite my disappointment surrounding the ending, however, M.L. Rio really does know how to write atmospheric prose. The beginning bits in the graveyard are really top notch and I so wish that sense of creepiness had lasted through the entire novella.

Oh, and if you're wondering about animal death, there's definitely some in this book. Most of the deaths happen “off stage” and don't involve any gore, but there is a scene with a rat that's fairly awful.

The audiobook recording is pretty well done, although there is one character who sounds kind of flat and rather AI-narrated. It's 100% a real human voice, but my first thought was “this narrator sounds like one of those AI book readers.” Otherwise, though, it was fine.

My overall rating: 2.65 stars, rounded up.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for providing me with an advance copy of this book to review. Its expected publication date is September 24, 2024.