Cora comes out of a psych ward at the start of this audiobook wanting nothing more exotic than a normal life, which is unavailable to her because she can see souls and the reapers who collect them. Ednah Walters gives that setup a romantic complication in the shape of Echo, whose presence happens to make the souls leave her alone and who is, inconveniently, a soul reaper himself. Eleven hours and three minutes of Norse mythology, heartbreak and reluctant attraction follow.
The Verdict, Briefly
Walters is doing something structurally interesting here that the reviewers spotted immediately. One calls this a refreshing look at an ongoing saga through Cora's eyes; another says that unlike all the other books, this one comes from Cora's point of view. So the appeal is not the mythology, which the series has presumably been building for a while, but the handover of the microphone to a secondary character. That is a strong reason to write a third volume and an even better reason to record one. A perspective shift is one of the few series moves that genuinely benefits from being heard rather than read, because a new narrating voice can be made audible instead of merely announced at the top of a chapter.
Stephanie Terry gets the whole of it, alone, which suits a book with one narrating consciousness. First-person young adult lives or dies on whether the voice sounds like the age it claims, and Cora is written with a specific texture: sarcastic about Echo, described as hot, beautiful and cocky, and privately wrecked by the guy who moved away without saying good-bye. A reader has to hold the sarcasm and the heartbreak in the same sentence for eleven hours, and the copy gives that reader plenty to work with: the chemistry is described as mind blowing, the connection as defying logic, and the object of it as the poster boy for everything Cora hates.
One phrase in the review column sounds at first like a comment on that performance. Her point of view is well delivered, writes KarenM of My Bookbag, and for a moment a browser might take that as praise for the recording. Check the date and the illusion collapses: February 19, 2015, ten months before this audio edition was published on December 22 of that year. The phrase is about Walters's prose. Nothing on this page is about Terry at all.
Why Listen to Grimnirs
Sasha supplies the most practical guidance available here, and it comes with a warning in capital letters: you must read this book before the next one to understand the character developments and the new characters being introduced. Read, note, not hear. That review also names the flaw it forgave, the spelling and grammar issues, which is a complaint about words on a page and cannot be verified or even perceived in a recording. Four stars despite it, and the sentence breaks off mid-word.
KarenM makes the case for the emotional content, crediting Walters with plausible inner and character dialogue and with adding a layer to the series by opening up Cora's family life, friendships and capacity to love. That review also opens with the word Spoiler repeated four times, which is a considerate instinct and a fairly reliable sign that the plot turns are worth protecting. Between them, the two most substantial responses on the page agree that this volume deepens rather than merely extends the sequence.
Five written responses sit here in total, arriving from the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, and three of the five were posted before the recording existed. The most recent, from April 2025, is a single line about being obsessed with the series and planning another pass through it. The earliest, from June 2014, predates the audio by roughly eighteen months. Whatever this column measures, it is not the experience of listening to this edition. One of them even opens with a truncated blog address, a review cross-posted from somewhere else entirely and clipped on arrival.
Points to Consider
Runes is the name reviewers use for the series this belongs to, and one of them calls this the third book outright. The series fields on this listing are empty. No name, no number, no link to whatever came before or after, on a title whose own reviewers insist on reading order in block capitals. A listener arriving cold gets Cora, Echo, references to a character called Torin, and a mention of Raines BFF, with nothing on the page to place any of them.
Echo and the mythology raise a related problem. Valkyries and Grimnirs are set against each other as categories, one reviewer describes deciding whether the division is that simple, and the copy assumes you already know what a Grimnir is before the title stops being a mystery. Newcomers can follow the romance without difficulty. The cosmology is another matter, and the listing offers no glossary, no series order and no indication of how much prior knowledge the recording assumes.
Torin, a name that appears only in a review, is described there as a dream male Valkyrie from an earlier volume, which is exactly the sort of context this page should be supplying itself. Meanwhile the rating field has given up entirely. The counter reports a single vote, five people have written paragraphs, and a lone whole-star vote cannot average out to 4.6 under any rounding rule anyone uses. Three of those five paragraphs also stop mid-sentence, one of them mid-word.
The Right Listener for Grimnirs
Paranormal romance listeners who like Norse material and a snarky first-person lead are the clear audience, especially anyone already invested in the wider sequence who wants the version told from the side character's chair. It works equally well for anyone who enjoys a love interest introduced as everything she claims to hate, since the copy sets that up in as many words. Eleven hours gives the slow thaw enough room to be convincing.
Set it aside if you need the earlier books first, because this page will not tell you what they are, and set it aside too if a shelf tag reading Arts and Entertainment on a Norse paranormal romance is the kind of thing that erodes your confidence in a listing. Cora's voice is what makes this volume worth the detour, and Terry is credited with carrying all eleven hours of it alone.
- Read by: Stephanie Terry credited alone for a first-person novel that hands the series over to a new point of view.
- At its heart: Soul reapers and Valkyries, heartbreak and rebound attraction, mental health stigma, loyalty across enemy lines.
- Vibe: Snarky, bruised and quick-moving, with mythology underneath.
- Short version: A smart point-of-view switch inside a long series, listed with no series fields and a rating that contradicts itself.
Good to Know
Where does this audiobook fall in the series?
Reviewers place it third and name the wider sequence, and one insists in capital letters that it must come before the next volume. The listing itself carries no series name and no number at all, so anyone relying on the page alone has no way to establish reading order.
Do any reviews describe the narration?
None do, though one comes close enough to mislead. A line praising how well the point of view is delivered was posted in February 2015, ten months before this recording appeared, so it concerns the prose rather than the performance. Stephanie Terry goes unmentioned across all five responses.
Why does the star average conflict with the vote count?
Because the two figures cannot both be right. The counter reports one vote while five written responses are visible on the page, and a single whole-star vote cannot produce a 4.6 average under any rounding convention. The badge is broken metadata rather than a summary of reception.
Can a newcomer start with this audiobook?
The romance is followable from a standing start, but the mythology is not. Valkyries, Grimnirs and a character named only in the reviews all arrive assuming prior knowledge, and no glossary or recap exists here. One reviewer explicitly warns against skipping ahead in the sequence.
