Grave Importance

• Author: Vivian Shaw
• Genre: Fantasy 
• Publication Date: September 24, 2019
• Publisher: Orbit
• Series: Dr. Greta Helsing #3

Thank you to Orbit and Oliver Wehner for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Oasis Natrun: an exclusive, secret luxury health spa for mummies, in the French countryside, equipped with the latest in therapeutic innovations both magical and medical. To Greta Helsing, doctor to the undead, it sounds like paradise. But when she is invited there as interim medical director, she is faced with a mystery that will take all her diagnostic skills to solve.

A peculiar complaint is arising among her mummy patients. With help from her friends and colleagues—including Dr. Faust, a sleepy scribe-god, witches, demons, a British Museum curator, and the inimitable vampyre Sir Francis Varney—Greta must cure this strange illness before anybody else crumbles to dust…and before the fabric of reality itself is torn apart.

The more of this series that I read, the more I fall in love with it, and this was the best book in the series for me. I’m both relieved to be getting another book in this series, but at the same time heartbroken that the next book will be the final book. Let me ramble on about how much I enjoyed this book.

Let me start by saying that this book and the series overall flow much more smoothly and are so much more enjoyable when read in order. I, naturally, had to learn this the hard way, but at least it was a novella I read before starting the series and not a full book. 

I’ve become quite attached to Greta, especially, but also the rest of her crew—Ruthven, Varney, and Fastitocalon—get to come back and play a pretty big role in this installation. The good doctor gets a little vacation but doesn’t quite get the break she was expecting when she takes over as interim medical director to an upscale health spa that caters to mummies. At least she got a break from the nonstop downpours occurring in London.

Greta is thrilled to get the chance to escape London and spend a few months in France, getting to work in a setting with a lot more resources than she has back home, and with a population she really enjoys working with, mummies. While learning about the newest treatments available and getting to know the mummies in residence at the spa, she gets caught up in a whole new mystery: what is happening to the mummies, and can she stop it before they crumble into a pile of dust? 

Along the way, we get to see Ruthven and his boyfriend Grisaille, who are on vacation elsewhere in Europe, until Ruthven becomes very sick with what no one initially expects to be a curse. But it quickly gets bad enough that Grisaille drags Ruthven to seek specialized medical care, and they cross paths with Greta. It turns out to be a really nasty curse that brings up more questions than it answers, and requires some additional help to figure out.

My favorite aspect of this book was the way the characters feel incredibly real, despite the fact that most of them are undead in some way or another. The interactions between the characters were those that I could picture having with my friends, or even overhearing while people watching. The characters are one of the major factors that made this series so good, and since I’ve gotten to know the characters better, their relationships and interactions really shone in this book.

There’s something endlessly appealing about urban fantasy, and the way that it reveals a secret world right underneath the world we know. It’s similar to the way I find it appealing to read mysteries or crime novels, because of the seedy underbelly to the places that we think of as familiar and even safe. How safe are we really, if there’s a crime boss or a serial killer living in our town? Or if there are vampyres, mummies, and ghosts waiting around, for that matter? But in this world, these are all characters who live, work, love, and suffer from maladies just like us, making them seem much less scary by demystifying them and making them not exotic or dangerous, necessarily.

Every time I thought that the plot was fully revealed, another mystery or shocker was revealed that added complexity and tension to the story. There is the issue of what is happening with the mummies, what exactly is wrong with Ruthven, and how all of this ties together. I promise you that it does tie together, with no shortage of action, mainly towards the end of the story. 

Overall, this was my favorite book in the series thus far. I couldn’t get enough of all of it, and I’m glad to know that there’s one more book in the series before I have to let go of them. The steady pace that slowly speeds up over the course of the story added tension that I really loved—it’s what kept me unable to put down the book. I also love the whole Dr. Helsing historical link, the way she solves not only regular mysteries, but also the most creative of paranormal medical mysteries, and how the characters relate to each other in such realistic ways. This is one not to miss if you like: urban fantasy, paranormal mysteries, books that incorporate humor with the mystery, exceptionally creative stories, and books that mash-up genres in a wonderful way.

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