#CBR11 Book 86: "Midnight Crossroad" by Charlaine Harris

Page count: 320 pages
Audio book length: 9 hrs 26 mins

Official book description:
Welcome to Midnight, Texas, a town with many boarded-up windows and few full-time inhabitants, located at the crossing of Witch Light Road and Davy Road. It’s a pretty standard dried-up western town.

There’s a pawnshop (someone lives in the basement and is seen only at night). There’s a diner (people who are just passing through tend not to linger). And there’s new resident Manfred Bernardo, who thinks he’s found the perfect place to work in private (and who has secrets of his own).

Stop at the one traffic light in town, and everything looks normal. Stay awhile, and learn the truth...

I really have read a LOT of Charlaine Harris' books. For my sins, I managed to force myself through the entirety of her Sookie Stackhouse series, just to see how it would end, long after I derived any enjoyment from them anymore. I've read her Lily Bard books, where apparently the character Bobo Whinthrop originates (I don't remember him, or much of the plot of the books at all). I have also read all of her Harper Connolly books, where Manfred Bernardo first appears (I vaguely remember him, but nothing of consequence). Generally, I find Harris' books perfectly entertaining while I'm reading them (except some of the later Sookie books, that pretty much just annoyed me), but shortly after reading them, I remember little to nothing of the plots.

Midnight Crossroad, which was adapted into the TV series Midnight, Texas on NBC (cancelled after two seasons) features a bunch of peculiar individuals living in the little town of Midnight in, you guessed it, Texas. Manfred Bernardo, a genuine psychic who makes his living telling fortunes over the phone and internet, moves there after the death of his grandmother. His new landlord is Bobo Winthrop, owner of the local pawnshop. One of Bobo's other tenants is a vampire, who lives with a gorgeous, but apparently very dangerous woman who travels a lot. There's Fiji Kavanaugh, who is a very powerful witch, but hides her actual powers by running a magic shop full of nick knacks. She has a talking cat. There's a nice gay couple, the rather strange reverend who gives non-denominational services at the local chapel (and conducts a lot of pet funerals), and Manfred falls pretty hard for Creek Lovell, the beautiful young woman whose overprotective father runs the gas station.

Harris' books always have a mystery element to them, as well. In this book, there's a group of neo nazis trying to harass Bobo, because they believe he knows the location of his crazy grandfather's legendary weapons arsenal. There's also a dead body found about a third of the way through the story, which turns out to belong to Bobo's ex-girlfriend, who he believed got sick of him and just up and left him one day. No one really believes that Bobo is guilty of murdering her, but it still takes quite a lot of time to figure out the guilty party.

As well as having been on my TBR list for years and years, this book fit into my Monthly Keyword Challenge in October. I listened to it on audiobook and it was perfectly fine, but really nothing more than that. Now, a month and a half later, I am hard pressed to remember any particular details - although I really did like Fiji's cat a lot - and the lisping way the narrator voiced him. My records show that over the years, I've acquired the entire series in various e-book sales, so I will most likely read the second two books eventually, as well, but I'm in no particular hurry to do so.

Judging a book by its cover: As with a lot of books, this one comes with several different versions of cover art. I think I like this one, with it's weird, crooked bird's eye view (which gives me a headache if I look at it for too long) of parts of the little town is my least favourite. Still, I own it in e-book, so it's not like I'll actually look at the cover a lot. I suspect Harris could sell books no matter what the cover art actually looks like.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

#CBR5 Book 52. "Dead Ever After" by Charlaine Harris

Page count: 352 pages
Rating: 3 stars

This is the thirteenth and final (whoo!) Sookie Stackhouse novel, the series on which the HBO series True Blood is now only extremely loosely based. This is absolutely NOT the best place to start if you've not read the books before. Better go back to the beginning and start with Dead Until Dark. This review will also contain spoilers for the ending of book 12: Deadlocked, so if you want to avoid that sort of thing, look away now.

Still here - then spoilers be on your own head. After literally bringing Sam back from the dead at the end of the previous book, using her magical fairy artifact, Sookie was sort of hoping that he might at least be a bit grateful. Instead, he seems mostly out of it. Eric is furious with her, as she could have used her "make any wish" bling to get him out of his wedding contract with the Vampire Queen of Oklahoma. Now, when Sookie goes to try to talk to him about it, she gets banned from Fangtasia.

Soon Sookie has bigger worries than the fact that her boss and close friend seems to want to avoid her, and her imperious vampire husband is about to divorce her and marry another. Arlene, former barmaid at Merlotte's and once Sookie's good friend (until she tried to lure Sookie into the hands of people who wanted to crucify, torture and murder her), has been released from prison on bail, and arrives at the bar to ask for her job back. Now, the answer is clearly no, but the fact that she was seen storming out of the bar looking angry certainly doesn't help Sookie's case, when Arlene's body is found in the dumpster behind the bar, strangled with one of Ms. Stackhouse's scarves.

Sookie's only alibi is verified by a vampire, not something necessarily helpful in a court of law. Luckily, she has made a lot of influential and resourceful friends over the years, who all turn up to help her clear her name.

I honestly can't remember whether the early books in the series (which I started reading nearly ten years ago) went into quite as much tedious detail about every aspect of Sookie's life as these later ones do. In the last one, very little of any consequence happened, and I was ready to tear my hair out if I had to read more about how Sookie shopped for groceries and pottered about around her house. There is still a fair bit of "and then I got dressed, and put on make-up and put my hair in a ponytail and drove to work" to this one, especially in the first half of the book, but there is also clearly a tying off of threads, and closing doors and saying goodbye to all the various characters in these books.

There are a lot of very angry fans out there on Goodreads and Amazon. So many people feel cheated by the way Harris chose to end her series. Frankly, after the last book, I was pretty much determined to read this book just out of stubbornness, because I'd stuck with the previous twelve. I don't want to spoil the ending (there's more than enough sites out there on the internet that will, though), but I can tell you that it didn't end, as I'd hoped, with Sookie simply choosing herself. God forbid that a woman in a paranormal fantasy series come to the conclusion that she's actually fine on her own, without a man to lean on. I can see why some people are pissed off, but considering the way the character development of certain prominent characters have been handled in the last few books, there really wasn't any other way for this to go. I'm sorry there wasn't more Pam in the book, she's always been my favourite character. All in all, I'm just glad the series didn't end with Deadlocked, and went out on a bit more of a high note.

And with that, I finish second in the race to complete the first 52 books of the CBR5, after the incomparable Jen K. Let's see if I can beat her to 104, shall we?

CBR4 Book 52: "Deadlocked" by Charlaine Harris

Page count: 336 pages
Rating: 2 stars
Date begun: May 6th, 2012
Date finished: May 8th, 2012

This is the 12th (and thankfully) penultimate novel in Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampire Mysteries/True Blood series, and while it may make some sense to a new reader, it's really not a good starting point. It will contain spoilers for the later half of the series, and the first books are much better anyway, so do yourself a favour and start there.

At this point, I'm really only reading this series because it's nearly at an end, and I've stuck with it for so long, I may as well see it through. I've quit so many series (Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth, Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum books, Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody (and all her damn relatives) series) because it just felt like a waste of time to keep going, and I must admit, if Harris hadn't promised to end with the next one, this series is getting to me close to the end of my patience.

It's not that stuff doesn't happen in the book, because it does. I just don't care much about it. As always, there is a mystery that's nominally the focus for the plot. Sookie arrives late at a gathering at Eric's house, to find him feeding on a young half-were woman. The woman later turns up dead on Eric's front lawn, and it's obvious that someone's setting him up. But the investigation into how the girl died and who killed her is not really dwelt on for long, because Sookie's too busy narrating in tedious detail every little thing she does with each and every minute of her day.

A lot of the people around Sookie are now in happy, stable relationships. Several are on the verge of getting married, or having babies. Sookie's not actually very happy with Eric, and even if they were to sort out their difficulties, having a vampire for a husband means Sookie can never have babies (although I guess she could adopt). Although frankly, with her extended faerie kin hanging around, and the complicated power plays and intrigue they get up to, I'm not entirely sure why she so desperately wants to continue her own bloodline. But yeah, there's a lot of focus on weddings, or pregnancies, or actual babies. None of which Sookie can have.

There's also trouble with Victor, the local King, who's there to investigate the death of his representative. But not much happens with that plot line, except his vampire entourage have a bit of an orgy, and Sookie's pissed off because they ruin Eric's coffee table.

Sookie also spends a lot of time worrying about the super powerful magic faery gift her grandmother left her, and it would be bad if other people found out that she has it. Events that take place suggest people might even be willing to kill to get their hands on this faery prezzie. There's also some sort of unrest among the werewolves, and Sam's werewolf girlfriend is jealous of Sookie or some such.

Stuff happens, but it's difficult to care much about it. The book ends on a bit of a cliff hanger, it may be Harris' way of telling us who Sookie should end up with in the end, but I hope not, as said character has been pretty seriously friend-zoned for a lot of the series, and it seems like a bad choice. I think the best ending would be Sookie deciding that she's happy on her own, but that's unlikely to happen. The reason this gets two stars is that despite the drag of the later books, I LIKE Sookie. I think she's grown a lot as a character, and I wish her well. It's just that Charlaine Harris should've ended the series quite some time ago.

Only one book to go. I'll probably read it, just to get closure.

****
And with that, dear Readers, I finish Cannonball Read IV! (although I'll keep blogging the books I enjoy).

CBR3 Book 41: "Dead Reckoning" by Charlaine Harris

Publisher: Ace
Page count: 336 pages
Rating: 3 stars
Date begun: May 8th, 2011
Date finished: May 10th, 2011

This is the eleventh book in the Sookie Stackhouse series, and it will make very little sense to anyone who hasn't read book 10 and quite a few of the others in the series. Standard warning about possible spoilers for previous books in the series.

 Sookie is still working as a waitress at Merlotte's, even though the business is not thriving, with a roadhouse opening up nearby, luring away many of the customers. It doesn't improve matters when someone attacks the bar and firebombs it. Everything happens very fast, but Sookie is pretty sure whoever attacked was two-natured.

Eric is distracted, and clearly has some kind of confict with Pam. Sookie can feel that he's upset through the blood bond they share, and Pam clearly wants to talk to her, but is forbidden to do so by Eric.Tired of not knowing whether her feelings for Eric are actually real, or brought forth by the blood bond between them, and the constant peril they keep experiencing, Sookie invites her witch friend and ex-roommate Amelia to come visit to see if the bond can be broken. However, breaking the bond could put Sookie in further danger from Victor, the newly installed regent in the area, who wants nothing more than to provoke Eric into doing something rash, so he can be removed once and for all.

Sookie finds out more about her heritage once she clears out a bunch of old furniture, and a cupboard contains a secret compartment with a mysterious fairy artifact and a letter from her grandmother. After talks with an old aqcuaintance, she even discovers where her telepathy came from. Now, she just has to survive Eric's power struggle with his boss, the plots of her fairy relatives, avoid a former adversary out for revenge, figure out how to help Sam get his business back on track and plan her friend Tara's baby shower.

Dead Reckoning was better than Dead in the Family, where I thought nothing much happened at all. I'm not entirely sure what Harris has planned for Sookie and the rest of the characters, there are clearly things set up in this book that will play out later, but she doesn't seem to be in a hurry to get there. Considering Sookie's life is threatened several times during the course of this book, it still seems to pass fairly slowly, and there seems to be very little of actual importance happening.

Certain parts of the plot completely messed up the continuity of previous books, and I think I will just ignore those, as either Harris is confused about what she previously wrote, or she's just committed a very unsuccessful ret-con. I'm not entirely happy with the direction she's taking Eric and Sookie's relationship, and after spending quite such a long time getting them together, she needs to decide if she actually wants them to ba a couple, or if she's just going to keep messing with them. She also needs to decide whether Sookie is ditzy and silly and impulsive to the point of being TSTL, or whether she's actually clever and resourceful, if somewhat weary of what her life since she was introduced to the supernatural world has become, because in this book she jumps between the two, and it gets confusing and frustrating. 

I didn't by any means hate the book, but the series is nowhere near as good as it was in the beginning. It seems as if Harris is just writing on autopilot, throwing inlife-threatening danger for Sookie in each book. In the first few, there was a central mystery to be solved, and each book ended with most of the story-strands tied up. Now each book ends in a much more open fashion, the focus is much more on vampire and faery politics, and I wish I had more confidence in Harris ending the series in a satisfactory way. Still, with only one book a year, I'll probably stick with it until the end.

CBR2 Books 60-63: The Harper Connelly books by Charlaine Harris

Book 1: Grave Sight
Book 2: Grave Surprise
Book 3: An Ice Cold Grave
Book 4: Grave Secret

Publisher: Gollancz
Total page count: 1216 pages
Rating: 3 or 3.5 stars
Date begun: June 23rd, 2010
Date finished: June 27th, 2010

WARNING! MAY CONTAIN MILD SPOILERS FOR GRAVE SECRET!
As I read all four books in 5 days, I decided to blog about them all in one review. Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse-books are currently enjoying great success, as HBO have loosely adapted them into the very entertaining True Blood. Having been a fan of Harris' Sookie books for nearly a decade, and having also read her Lily Bard-books, I decided that I was curious to see what the Harper Connelly books were like.

Unlike the Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampire-series, there is nothing really supernatural at all about these books. Once you accept the premise that Harper Connelly developed the ability to sense where the dead lie, and what they died of, after being hit and nearly killed by lightning, these books are pretty much straight-forward mystery/suspense novels. All four books are easy and entertaining reads, and the series seems pretty much completed after book 4. I think Harris could probably continue the series if she chose, but the various threads begun in the first three are completed in book 4, so if she chooses not to write any more, the readers will not feel cheated.

Harper Connelly and her stepbrother Tolliver Lang travel around the US helping people find dead people. As mentioned, Harper senses the dead after being hit by lightning as a teenager in her parents' trailer. She would have died if Tolliver didn't perform CPR on her until emergency services arrived. Harper's mother and Tolliver's father were high powered and successful lawyers who married, and then started using drugs and alcohol, until they were a lot less successful, and Harper, Tolliver and the lives of siblings became really quite grim. They spent much of their teenage years trying to take care of their baby sisters and fooling the authorities about what really went on in their home. Once Harper's older sister Cameron disappears, however, they have to contact the police, and the family gets split up. Harper got placed in a foster home, Tolliver went to live with his older brother, and their baby sisters got taken in by Harper's religious aunt.

Now Harper and Tolliver make money by hiring Harper's services to people. In Grave Sight, they get called to a small town to find the body of a missing teenager. Harper finds the body, but since she can also determine cause of death if she is close enough to the remains, she discovers that the missing girl was shot in the back twice, and once at the grave of the boy suspected of killing said girl, she reveals that the boy did not commit suicide like everyone suspected, but was killed as well. When it's also revealed that the missing girl's sister was murdered, the plot thickens. Not everyone is happy about Harper's revelations, and both her and Tolliver's lives are threatened before they can leave town.

In Grave Surprise, Harper and Tolliver are called to Memphis by an anthropology professor determined to prove to his class that Harper's abilities are bogus. Instead Harper pretty much baffles his entire class with her "powers", and also, unexpectedly, discovers the body of a young girl in an old grave. The body is that of an eleven-year-old Harper had been asked to find a few years earlier, but as she can only sense dead bodies, not locate specific ones, she was never able to find the girl. Now the case is reopened, and the coincidence of the body being in an old, unused graveyard Harper just happened to be in seems to great for the Connelly/Lang siblings to ignore. They decide to try to solve the murder themselves.

In An Ice Cold Grave, Harper faces her most difficult case yet, when she is called to find a missing teenager in Doraville, North Carolina. He is one in a long line of young men who the town suspect ran away. Harper finds not only his body, but that of eight other boys, brutally murdered, and clearly tortured before their deaths. The town is deeply shocked by her discovery, and the serial killer clearly has no plans to let Harper live to discover his identity.

In Grave Secret, Harper and Tolliver go home to visit their shared younger sisters, and to reveal to Harper's aunt and uncle who are raising them, that their relationship has changed beyond that of stepsiblings. They are also asked by a local rich woman to determine the cause of death of her father. While doing this, Harper also discovers that said rich woman's father's nurse died, not from a burst appendix, but from complications in childbirth. The woman wants Harper's help to find the missing child, even though Harper and Tolliver try to explain that Harper can only find dead people. As the case progresses, however, it seems strangely linked to the disappearance of Harper's sister Cameron all those years ago, and Harper and Tolliver may finally find out what happened to her.

All four books were entertaining, and well written. Harper is a smart and capable young woman, who has been through a lot of difficult things in her life, but is determined to make the best of it. She is often met with suspicion and sometimes even hostility because of what she has chosen to make a living of, a lot of people think that she is a fraud and that she is conning and exploiting grieving families to support herself and her stepbrother.

Tolliver is Harper's assistant, manager, companion and best friend. As Harper often gets exhausted and worn out after doing a job, she needs someone around to take care of her, and she frequently suffers from headaches and muscle aches, even though the lightning strike was years ago. He organizes her life so she doesn't have to.

CBR2 Book 48: "Dead in the Family" by Charlaine Harris

Publisher: Ace Hardcover
Page count: 320 pages
Rating: 4 stars
Date begun: May 6th, 2010
Date finished: May 7th, 2010

WARNING! CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE PREVIOUS SOOKIE STACKHOUSE NOVELS, ESPECIALLY DEAD AND GONE

Sookie Stackhouse is slowly recovering from her near-death experience in the previous book. She realizes that she has a lot of pent up anger, and she has certainly changed from the innocent, rather lonely young woman of the first books. Now she's in a relationship with a very powerful vampire, but she also worries that their connection could be weakening his resolve in the continuing power struggle with the vampires. She is also still not entirely safe, some may try to threaten or kill her to get to him.

She is no longer so alone, though, and realizes, partially through examining the losses of all those who have died around her, that she has many close ties, to both the human and supernatural community. Her recently widowed brother seems to have found happiness again, and has become a lot less self-centred as a result of his losses. Two of her friends are pregnant, and while not everyone is delighted at the recent coming-out of the werewolves and other two-natured creatures, Sookie is loyal and fiercely defends her boss and other friends.

Her previous roommate moves out and goes back to New Orleans, but she acquires another, in the form of her super hot strip club owning faerie cousin, who claims he feels lonely after the death of his sisters. Claude is not the only faerie left around after the recent war, and Sookie is worried when she is told there are clear signs of unknown faeries in the forest around her house. Then a fresh body is discovered, and someone has clearly buried it there to get her in trouble.

Added to all this, her boyfriend's maker and his new protegee shows up in town and creates all manner of trouble, both for Sookie and her undead lover. Her boyfriend's "brother" was turned when he was 13, and has a very troubled past - which seems to have turned him insane.

I preferred this book to Dead and Gone, possibly because I like my Sookie Stackhouse books to be a lighthearted entertainment, and the main character of a book being kidnapped, tortured and nearly killed does not spell out lighthearted to me. In this one, Sookie has both physical and mental scars, but has emerged safe and strong, if a lot less innocent and kindhearted. Dead in the Family was one of the better of the ten books, but Charlaine Harris does seem to like end her books very abruptly. I almost wondered if there was a page or two missing when I got to the end, before I remembered that she often ends her books that way.