Night Shift by Charlaine Harris

Starting to feel like a theme here in my readings, recently. There is an evil presence in the crossroads at the heart of Midnight, Texas, and it is drawing people to its heart, where they commit suicide, and fuel its escape from captivity. We have some growing sub plots, as well, with our discovery that Midnight is being watched by allies of Olivia's father and enemies at the same time, Fiji's discovery of her maturing witch powers, and Diederick's discovery of the opposite sex.

Lemuel must decipher the ancient account in Etruscan of the binding of a demon to help his friends in Midnight to recreate the bonds holding a powerful being captive, and the denizens of Midnight will have to work together to defeat this evil.

A fun, quick read. I'm not enjoying this series as much as the Sookie Stackhouse novels, but Harris is always entertaining.

Day Shift by Charlaine Harris

It hadn't been very long for me since I read the first book in this series, Midnight, Texas, so I didn't really need it, but Harris does a nice little cast call in the first few pages of the book, reminding us of all the dramatis personae we got to know in the first book. A large corporation has purchased the defunct hotel in town and are renovating it to turn it into a senior citizens transitional facility, with a few regular hotel rooms to rent to nearby tech workers, as well. Manfred and Fiji and Bobo and the rest of our friends gather gradually on Witch Light Road to watch the construction crews arrive, and the work begin. Nice touch.


The main plot of the story, however, results from an unfortunate incident related to Manfred's work. One of his clients, an elderly woman whose husband recently "passed on to the other side" dies suddenly during a reading, and the woman's paranoid son accuses Manfred of murdering her and stealing her jewelry, which she had hidden from her greedy offspring. Manfred and his friends attempts to discover the whereabouts of the missing treasure and the identity of the real murderer (it wasn't really natural causes after all) proceeds in a haphazard fashion, but eventually accomplishes at least one of those goals, with some surprising twists along the way.


There's more than one tie-in to the Sookie Stackhouse series here that all her fans will appreciate, and Midnight, Texas acquires a few new residents to keep things interesting. We also get the chance to learn some surprising things about various residents during our sojourn in the Lone Star state.


Time to put the next book on hold at the local library.

Midnight Crossing by Charlaine Harris

Now that Harris has finished with the Sookie Stackhouse novels, she's moved on to a new venue in the stories of Midnight, Texas. The story begins when a twenty-something Internet psychic, Manfred, with a touch of the real "sight" moves to a backwater town and meets a very odd assortment of residents. His landlord, Bobo, is the owner of a pawnshop which may have been around since Texas' founding, and who we find out eventually was a minor character in Harris' earlier series about the town of Shakespeare. His grandfather was a white supremacist who amassed a legendary hoard of weapons. To this day, militias around the country believe that Bobo knows what happened to that stash.

The pawnshop is tended during the nighttime hours by a vampire named Lemuel, who has definitely been around for a long time, and some of his clientele are definitely on the eerie side. He has a "girlfriend" named Olivia, whom I assume is some sort of vampiric human servant, or Renfro, who is quite a handy person to have around in a pinch.

The girl next door is Fiji, who is a practicing witch. She teaches classes and sells herbal concoctions out of her home which doubles as a shop and classroom, but she actually does have some supernatural powers, and her cat, Mr. Snuggly, has a few tricks up his...paws...too. There's the gay couple, Chuy and Joe, who run a combination salon and antique gallery, and the couple who own the only diner in town, Home Cookin', Madonna and Teacher. We have a family that runs the gas station and mini mart, Shawn, Creek and Connor, and Rev, a very different sort of preacher running the wedding chapel and pet cemetery.

When the body of a missing woman turns up, and some of the militia members hunting for Bobo's granddaddy's arsenal get feisty, things start to heat up, with some really surprising twists in this new mystery by Harris.

Definitely Dead by Charlaine Harris

On another recent road trip, my wife picked out this book by Charlaine Harris which we had both read before - a number of years ago when it first came out, so it wouldn't be completely familiar, but at least would provide some entertainment by an author we enjoy.

One of the things we noticed was that it seemed to take a long long time to get from one chapter to then next. I think we had nearly four hours of listening, and were only up to about Chapter 7 of the novel. Being read to really slows things down. Another thing we noticed was the preponderance of "bodice-ripping" romance that I'd never paid much attention to while reading Harris' Sookie stories before. Do we ordinarily just zoom through that while we're reading, getting to the action/adventure of the story?

We ran out of time on our trip just about the point where the action seemed to shift into gear, as Sookie travels to New Orleans with Mr. Cataliades (the demon lawyer) and Bill (her former lover) to go through the house which used to belong to her cousin Hadley (a murdered vampire), and from which  task forces unknown seem to be trying to stop her. As usual, multiple plot lines keep things interesting.

May have to re-read this series from the beginning some day.

Cemetery Girl: The Pretenders by Charlaine Harris and Christopher Golden

 So, I had no idea this was a graphic novel when I put it on hold at the library; I just saw that Charlaine Harris had something new out after ending her Sookie Stackhouse southern vampire series, and clicked the button. It's the first graphic novel I've ever read, so I can't even really tell you if it was any good or not. The illustration seemed good, about the same quality I remember from comic books back in my tender youth, and the story line was at least somewhat intriguing. But, at best, a graphic novel like this one has about the same nutritional value as a rice krispy treat.

The heroine of this tale is beaten, drugged, thrown in the trunk of a car and left for dead in a cemetery - and perhaps she was dead. She has no memory of who she is, or where she came from, and she adopts a new name from several different tombstones and the name of the cemetery which she begins to haunt. She is befriended, in much the same way as one tames a feral neighborhood cat, by the caretaker on the grounds, and an elderly widow living nearby. She fears most of all that the people who left here there will find her and finish the job, so she continues to hide out until the night she witnesses a murder in the graveyard. After her near death experience, she has gained the ability to see ghosts of the freshly departed, and when the ghost of the slain girl takes up residence in her head, she is forced to come out of hiding long enough to bring the killers to justice.

A light read, but not light reading, if you know what I mean.

Dead Ever After by Charlaine Harris

 So, according to Charlaine Harris' website, this is supposed to be the last of the Southern Vampire novels about Sookie Stackhouse. I expected that she'd be left truly dead in a gutter at the end of the book, somehow, especially as her old enemies all begin to gather and head back to town, with vengeance in mind. But Harris seems to me to have left the door open at the end for Sookie to have a figurative, if not literal, resurrection, and have more profitable (for the author) adventures some day. Of course, you can't trust a popular character to remain safely dead (or undead) these days, just look at Harry Dresden, for example.

Sookie once again gets the opportunity, living in interesting times in Bon Temps, to find out who's really got her back, versus who's just waiting to plant a blade in it. She and Sam Merlotte, her former boss and now partner in the bar, struggle to figure out what their new roles are going to be, especially since Sam is trying to get used to being alive after his untimely demise in the last Sookie misadventure. Eric is hoping somehow to keep his love affair with Sookie alive, even if he has to divorce her and wed a vampire queen in a prearranged marriage, ordained by his master, Felipe. But Sookie isn't thrilled with the prospect of being his sub rosa mistress for what's left of her life, before Eric decides to "turn" her for her own good - and preserve her youthful beauty, of course.

In the midst of this, her old friend, Arlene, who betrayed Sookie and would have seen her literally crucified, gets out on bail and comes for a visit. Someone decides she's more useful to them dead, and frames Sookie for the murder, so she gets to model an orange jumpsuit for a while. But she gets more support from the community than she expected, and her supernatural allies rally to help her beat the rap, while they also must hunt down the true killers and figure out why our heroine is being targeted.

Unlike what you'd expect from the title, it doesn't wrap up tidily and happily ever after for Miss Stackhouse, but at least the current crop of criminals is disposed of for a time. I'd put the odds of a new novel in the series appearing within three to five years at better than even.

Deadlocked by Charlaine Harris

In Deadlocked, Harris once again skillfully weaves several plot conflicts together that Sookie must navigate without getting herself of any of her friends into more trouble than they already have. At the same time, various more mundane events proceed relatively smoothly, such as Tara and JB's baby's arrival, her brother, Jason's engagement, and Sookie's mental transition from employee to part owner of Merlotte's bar. Harris does a good job of reminding us all that in the midst of crises, life proceeds apace all around us.

The vampire King of Louisiana, Felipe de Castro, has arrived in Bon Temps ostensibly to get to the bottom of the disappearance of his lieutenant, whom Sookie and her allies disposed of in the last adventure. There are undertones, however, that indicate that Felipe knew what Victor was up to all along, and manipulated matters so that his ambitious ally would be destroyed when he crossed Eric, who is a much stronger vampire than indicated by his relatively humble position in the heirarchy.

The first big wrinkle in the fabric shows up at a party hosted by Eric when a blood donor is mysteriously murdered shortly after being kicked out of the house when Sookie arrives unexpectedly to catch Eric in the bedroom, drinking the girl's blood. Sookie and Bill have to figure out who actually killed the girl so that the human police's suspicions are directed away from Eric.

The fairies are restless, too. Claude's strip club seems to be staffed almost entirely by them, and he may be gathering them for purposes of his own. When he journeys with the fairy prince, Niall, back to the fae lands, Sookie's cousin Dermott is unable to keep them under control, and soon there are reports of strange animal killings in the nearby woods.

Sam's girlfriend, Janalyn, is jealous of Sookie, and keeps trying to find some way to discredit her with Sam. Since Janalyn is also the enforcer for Alcyde's pack, Sookie must take somewhat politcal approach to keeping her at bay.

And finally, the Queen of Louisiana's vampires pays Sookie a visit to tell her that she wants to take Eric as her consort, and that Eric's maker signed a contract allowing her to do so. This throws a huge monkey wrench in the middle of their relationship, and Sookie and Eric are forced to make choices about what they most truly love in the climax of this book.

Dead Reckoning by Charlaine Harris

I waited quite a while for this one to show up at the library. I believe I was 63rd on the request list. As always, Sookie is just trying to get along with everyone, working at Merlotte's bar, when someone decides to throw a Molotov cocktail through the window. She suspects it's a were of some sort, from observing the speed with which the missile was thrown, but no clues are readily available, and it goes into the hopper of mysteries to be solved.

Business has been slow at her friend, Sam's bar, and eventually we find out that a major cause of this is a new bar that's been opened up by Eric's nemesis, Victor, not too far away. Victor has also opened up a bar to compete with Fangtasia, and Eric's business is also feeling the pinch. Pam has a human lover who is dying of leukemia, and Victor, as regent of Louisiana is denying her permission to bring the woman over, so she won't die the final death. There's also some nasty little secret that Pam knows about Eric, and he is forcing her to remain silent about it with Sookie.

Sookie's faerie roommates, Claude and Dermot, are up to capers of their own, as well, which they aren't particularly forthcoming. Sookie discovers a letter from her grandmother in a secret compartment of an antique desk which reveals some secrets about her faerie blood. The remaining Van Pelt sister, who has a vendetta against Sookie, has gotten out of jail, and probably wants to kill her.

There's a ton of little threads here that Harris manages to tie together pretty well by the end, but there's really nothing all that exciting in this 11th installment. You might say that Sookie is "growing up", and geting a little more calloused to the violence going on around her, but I feel like the author has let her drift a little out of character, perhaps.

There's one scene where, after a bloody battle between the forces of good and evil, Eric is feeling, shall we say, "invigorated" by the bloodshed, and decides he wants to suck on Sookie's neck. Sookie is disgusted by the carnage, and tells him "No", but he grabs her and says "I will drink", and slurps away to his heart's content. This seems like a form of rape, to me, and I would think she should be more indignant about the whole deal, but she just lets it go. Even in a consensual bloodsucking relationship, doesn't No mean No?

Not top-notch, unfortunately.

Short Takes

(2/8/09) Enjoyed Ted Nugent's book Ted, White and Blue. Interesting slant on things from the old rocker.
"Sometimes you give the world the best you got, and you get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you got anyway. Success and happiness drive the assholes berzerk. That is simply a bonus."

(2/8/09) From Charlaine Harris, A Fool and His Honey, the latest Aurora Teagarden mystery - very upsetting.

(2/19/09) Started Iaccoca's book, Where Have All the Leaders Gone?, threw it aside in disgust and went back to fiction for a while.

Poppy Done to Death by Charlaine Harris

I picked this book up from the library at the same time as its predecessor, Last Scene Alive. There's a family dinner scene in LSA where we meet some of Roe's relatives for the first time, and it mentions her sister-in-law, Poppy. I immediately had an "Aha!" moment - this girl is toast for Thanksgiving.

Sure enough, Poppy is about to be inducted into the group, Uppity Women, in Lawrencetown, a signal honor. On the day of the ceremony, however, she is a no-show. When Roe and her other sister-in-law, Melinda go over to her house to berate her, they find her dead in her kitchen, stabbed to death.

We quickly find out that there are plenty of suspects for Poppy's popping, mostly jealous wives of all the men she's slept with. She and her husband, John David, seem to have an open marriage, and despite outward appearances, she never really settled down after marriage and childbirth from her wild teens. One of the men she has slept with is the chief of police, Arthur, which has the effect of making him rather ineffectual for this investigation, so (are you surprised?) Roe turns out to be the only person capable of solving this mystery.

And on the subject of repeating themes in my reading lately, I mentioned in my review of Kitty and the Silver Bullet about women who are clueless about the fact that they are pregnant. Here we go again. Aurora starts experiencing some symptoms like being tired a lot, gaining a bit of weight, having sore breasts...and has no idea that she's pregnant till Melinda brings it up. Huh? Maybe it's not so much the experiencing of the symptoms, as the way that authors mention the symptoms that makes me aware they're pregnant long before they "get it."

If you've been following Aurora's adventures at all, you'll probably love this one, too.

One great quote for you fellow booklovers:
"...I gathered, that the day he touched books voluntarily was a day that should be marked on the calendar. I supressed a sigh. It was hard to believe a brother of mine wasn't a reader. I had never been able to figure out what non-readers did. Maybe, during Phillip's stay, I'd find out."

Last Scene Alive by Charlaine Harris

I was going through my online journal the other day, pulling out things I'd written about books I was reading, and found the following entry from February 8, 2009,  "From Charlaine Harris, A Fool and His Honey, the latest Aurora Teagarden mystery - very upsetting." The only thing I could recall about what upset me was that Harris had killed off Aurora's husband or boyfriend, but couldn't remember the details. When I ran across the next novel in the series at the library, well...

This one picks up about six months later, while Aurora is still grieving for her dead husband, Martin, and living in a great pile of a house all by herself, aside from Madeleine the cat, that is. She is about to be jolted out of her dolorous rut, however, by the arrival in town of the film crew working on a tv miniseries adaptation of her ex-boyfriend, Robin Crusoe's novel about murder and mayhem in Lawrencetown.

If you've read any of this series, you know of course that there will be a murder pretty soon, and when the star actress of the series turns up dead in her dressing room, Aurora can't help but butt in. There's some interesting twists in that the victim turns out to have possibly been murdered three times, first by drugging, next by smothering, and finally whacked in the head with her Emmy statuette, so it's possible that more than one person had something to do with it.

What's more interesting to me about this novel is that it falls into a common theme I'm noticing this fall/winter of being a transitional novel. The first one that I remember reading was Changes, by Butcher. One might have guessed from the title that it was going to be a big transition in the Harry Dresden series, and all of us fans are sitting around wondering what direction that transition is really going to take, and the only hint we've had is from the short story Aftermath, in Side Jobs.

More recently, I read Kitty and the Silver Bullet, by Vaughn. There's a big transition that takes place there, too. Kitty finally is forced to quit running away, and has to confront her fears and her ex-pack, so she can return to her home town of Denver, spend more time with her family, and move on with her life.

Now, in Last Scene Alive, Roe must move past her grief, sell the house where she lived with Martin, find love again, and move on to the next phase. If I thought about it some more I could probably find a few more examples of transitional novels in a series from my recent reading, too. I always hope that when this happens, it will mean a new bit of excitement from the author, and a breath of spring for her readers.

Enigma by Robert Harris

As I may or may not have previously mentioned, I do occasionally read something other than science fiction and fantasy. While in the midst of publishing doldrums, I'll pick up some sort of popular novel - in the spy, adventure, or mystery genres. Such a novel is Enigma, by Robert Harris. I've read one of his other novels, whose name I can't recall at the moment (Fatherland), and enjoyed it, so I thought I'd try another that my friend, Tim, recommended.


Enigma is a story about codebreakers during World War II in Great Britain. I'm not sure but what this qualifies as an alternate history novel - from what I remember, his other novel I read certainly did. Anyway, we pick up the story of a young mathematician in England's codebreaking corps, Tom Jericho, as he is recovering from a nervous breakdown suffered after breaking one of the German high command's toughest codes, Shark, which is encoded on the Enigma machines.

Through judicious use of some flashbacks, which don't distract from the main story line, we learn how Tom worked himself to the point of collapse breaking codes, then was driven over the edge by a love affair gone mysteriously wrong. He had become involved with Claire, a rather mysterious young woman who is a clerical worker in another area of the base where Tom and his colleagues work.

Tom's old boss recruits him once more, barely recovered from his breakdown, to help break a new variant of the Shark code, which has been switched by the high command either in response to the sinking of one too many german U-boats, or because a spy in the ointment has alerted them that the old code was broken. The breaking of Shark is given a new sense of urgency because the german U-boats are zeroing in on an American convoy carrying vital war materials.

Shortly after Tom returns to work, Claire disappears, and Tom alternates his time between working on the mystery of the new enigma cypher, and the mystery of Claire's disappearance.

Anyway, there are a number of interesting plot twists, tho I had the villain of the piece picked out rather early. The whole tone of the work is rather depressing, however, as Harris enshrouds the novel in a sense of stiff upper lip British fatalism, what?
Pick it up at the local bookstore or borrow it from a friend as you will, it should provide you with a couple of hours of enjoyment.

Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris

I can hardly believe this is the first Charlane Harris book I've reviewed here, but I pretty much read everything of hers I could get my hands on a couple of years ago, and this is her most recent Sookie Stackhouse novel, so the timing on when I started my blog might have kept her from appearing sooner.

I think I waited too long for this one to come in on request at my local library, and I probably should have bit the bullet and bought it to read sooner. I was really struggling trying to remember what had gone before in the series. Perhaps I'm going to have to perform a reboot and work my way through the series again, like I do with the Anita Blake and Dresden Files, and Honor Harrington, and... There used to be a fairly common preface in book series that got people caught up, but I think the custom has faded with time.

Sookie just has way too much on her plate, and too many plates to keep spinning some days. Her friend, Bill, is still suffering from silver poisoning from a Faerie bite. The were community is facing some new legislation that will require them to register as shifters, so the government can keep track of them (shades of Jewish persecution here, perhaps?). Her vamp boyfriend, Eric, is being targeted by one of the Vegas vampires who wants to take over his territory. Her witch-y friend, Amanda, is moving out of Sookie's house, while her faerie cousin, Claude, wants to move in. The FBI is trying to pin some crime, any crime, on her. Eric's maker and Master shows up unexpectedly, with a hopelessly insane "sibling" to deal with. Half her friends are pregnant, and the other half seem to be getting married. This book is very full of plots and sub-plots.

I need a scorecard.

If you've been following Sookie closely, you're going to love this one, as it wraps up a few of the story elements neatly, but still leaves plenty of good supernatural plots open for her next book.

Grave Secret, by Charlaine Harris

I've always really enjoyed the stuff Charlaine Harris writes, from the Sookie Stackhouse novels on which the tv series True Blood is based, to the Aurora Teagarden, Shakespeare, and Harper Connelly series, so I was happy to see this latest from her. For those of you who are new to the serires, Harper Connelly was struck by lightning as a teenager, and as she recovered, she discovered the ability to listen to the dead, to learn just a bit about the last minutes of their lives. She's traveled around the country using this ability to help people know how their loved ones died.
Harper and her step-brother/lover Tolliver have returned to the Dallas area to work for a rich family, the Joyces, who want to know how their grandfather died. He'd been found out on the ranch after an apparent heart attack. The things that Harper discovers during her walk throught the family gravesites stir up the past in ways that bring trouble to the Joyces and to her, as well.
She and Tolliver had a rotten upbringing. His father and her mother were both drug addicts, who neglected their children to the point of abuse. They have a pair of younger sisters who were adopted by Harper's aunt and uncle, who now live in Garland, near Dallas. So, they decide to hang around for a while to visit with the girls. While they are there, they find out that Tolliver's father has been released from prison, and wants to reunite with his family.
Harper has also been haunted for years by the disappearance of her older sister, Cameron, which happened about eight years ago. Wherever she travels, she's on the lookout for evidence of her sister's fate.
Someone in town either doesn't like Harper's work with the dead in the first place, the results of her investigation of the Joyce's family patriarch's death, or something else entirely. A drive-by shooter wounds Tolliver, leaving him in the hospital, then kills a couple of other people who get too close to Harper. Figuring out whodunnit in this case involves some interesting twists, and is definitely an enjoyable read.