Strange New World

De: Vivian Shaw

Narrado por: Catrin Walker-Booth

"Vivian Shaw knocks it out of the park yet again. If you aren’t reading Dr. Greta Helsing, you’re missing out." —T. Kingfisher, New York Times bestselling author of What Moves the Dead

"Deeply compassionate and endlessly surprising, this series will steal your heart." —Grace D. Li, New York Times bestselling author of Portrait of a Thief

In this witty conclusion to a delightful fantasy series finds Greta Helsing, doctor to the undead, facing the latest and strangest challenge of her career...accompanying an anxious angel and a sullen demon on a road trip across America.

After narrowly avoiding the end of the world, the leaders of Heaven and Hell are struggling to collaborate according to the terms of their new treaty—especially because angels and demons are, quite literally, allergic to each other. Seeking a solution, the powers that be decide to see if the allergy persists on Earth by sending an angel and demon on a research trip, first stop: New York City. And what better chaperone than Dr. Greta Helsing, who happens to owe Hell a few favors of her own?

But there’s unrest in New York’s monster underworld and Greta and her team are about to land in the middle of it. Something is off in Heaven and on Earth, and Greta will have to figure out just what that is if she hopes to protect those she loves most.

©2025 Vivian Shaw (P)2025 Orbit

A captivating story with exquisite narration

I have so enjoyed the narrator in this series, throughout all the books. The narrator absolutely sinks into Greta Helsing's character. You can almost feel Greta speaking directly to you, it is so realistically personal. Not only that, she does quite excellent straight male voices, and really delightful gay male voices, lovely aristocratic voices, impressive male lion shifter voices (he's one of my favorite characters in an earlier book in the series -- who doesn't love a sexy French alpha lion shifter?). She voices perfectly believable thug voices, immature child vampire voices... this narrator is an absolute miracle on the planet, and I'm going to be searching for more books she has voiced.

Meanwhile, the author, Vivian Shaw, what a gift to the planet she is. She has been crafting this series for years, and once you have listened to all the books, you'll understand why this isn't a crank-it-out-in-a-hurry series. These stories carry the characters forward, so you can feel your relationship with all of them growing, as you fall in love with their little quirks. But, the background of this series is world-wide. And the issues that are thrown at Greta range from conspiracies, to pieces of Creation running amuck, to the destruction of the time line, to the end of the earthly plane. There are ghouls, and vampires, and vampyres, and so many interesting, exotic non-human types of beings you've never heard of, and so many of them come to Greta's medical clinic for treatment, on Harley Street, no less! This is such a delightful fantasy world Vivian Shaw has crafted over the years. It is so easy to visualize in your mind and just hang out there as the stories unfold. Mummies needing re-wrapping, teething baby ghouls, a Medusa-snake-haired medical assistant, the delights just do not end in these stories. This series is such a delight. I truly, truly, hope you invest in this series, and make it a part of your read-once-a-year-list, like I have.

Worth it

I love this author and these characters!!! I’m so happy she wrote a fourth book. Absolutely worth the listen.

Fantastic per usual

I've read the 3 other books in this series and this one is a great cap on them. The narrator is truly talented and the writing style was consistent with the other books. The story surprised me and I felt as if I had missed a book in between, so maybe I need to refresh my memory with the previous book. It's so interesting that the medical drama is only part of the story, with political intrigue, murder mystery, and supernatural world-building making up the other big pieces. it does seem quite similar to the monk book, and also a bit predictable , I kept waiting for a twist at the end and there was none, just a straight line. But still solid writing and entertaining to read .

Excellent from the start

I just love these books. The author is talented and creative and I love listening to her stories. One of the things that I love about these books as they aren’t depressing and they show a positive way to resolve things.

whimpering narrator detracted

The story was a little tedious and the narrator sounded like each sentence was a whimper or a weak question. I liked the first couple of Greta Helsing stories very much but this focused on administrative differences between heaven and hell as Arch Angel Gabriel had a breakdown, and didn't capture my interest at all.
I missed the different monsters and the tension in the first few stories between expectation and monstrous reality. This just felt like a few ideas linked by a bunch of "get on with it, already!"

A bit disjointed and rambling

The first 3 1/2 books in this series are some of my favorite comfort reads. I love the worlds created, and the wonderful characters. The author makes “monsters” feel very human. I was very much looking forward to a continuation of the series, but I have to say I’m a bit disappointed in this one.

First of all, it jumps around a LOT, from heaven, to hell, to various locations in NYC and London, and to Transylvania. And we have different characters in each location, with different points of view. And there is a LOT of jumping, which made it hard to follow exactly what was happening, and hard to connect with the characters, because we spent so little time at each location. So it felt like the story moved in fits and starts.

Secondly, we’re still dealing with the repercussions of the war in heaven in book three, and the resultant rapprochement between heaven and hell, which was not my favorite part of book three. It gets a little too esoteric and philosophical for me. I much preferred when the plot focuses on Greta and the supernatural beings she treats as a doctor. Those are much more interesting.

And once again, like in book one, we have a weird Christian cult that is attacking supernatural creatures. It just felt like a retread of plots in previous books, with not a lot of new subject matter. There just wasn’t much NEW ground being covered here. There’s a bit of nice stuff at the end about knowing who you are, and being helped by friends, but that’s really the only thing that is unique to this book.

I also think there’s a gaping plot hole as to who was behind the initial attacks in London. That was never explained and that is a huge question that no one seemed to care about. The author really dropped the ball, there, imo.

So, overall, I’m a bit disappointed in this one. Maybe I’ll feel better about it after a few days, but right now, immediately after finishing it, I’m let down by this book, I’m sorry to say. It’s not BAD, but it’s just not the caliber of her previous books. Fans of the series will want to read it, and it won’t be a waste of time, but I don’t know that this is one I’ll repeatedly read, like the previous books in the series.

The narrator was pretty good, though she read out the initials JHVH instead of saying “Jehovah” or “Yahweh”, and at first I didn’t know what was being referenced that way! But otherwise she was good.