Harper Connelly has what you might call a strange job: she finds dead people. If you're new to Harris, start with Dead Until Dark (the first Sookie Stackhouse vampire book) or Shakespeare's Landlord (the first Lily Bard mystery) instead.Join Harper Connelly as she uncovers the secrets - and bodies - buried deep in this paranormal mystery series from bestselling author Charlaine Harris. I'll read the sequels, but I can't recommend buying it in hardcover. It also doesn't help that the central puzzle is obvious. It's utterly lacking in humor, and unusually dark for Harris (which is saying something). Harris can do much better than Grave Sight.

In Grave Sight, Harper and Tolliver are outsiders, and their social interactions are brief and shallow. I've always loved they way Charlaine Harris plays with the strict social niceties of the Deep South everyone knows their role and their obligations, and you can be as cruel or as kind as you like so long as you observe the proper forms, but God help you and the next three generations of your family if you break the rules by mistake.

The other characters are even less endearing. Because the entire story is spent in hostile territory, Harper's emotional gamut runs from defensive to paranoid. I just never grew to like the protagonist Harper has the requisite tragic past and an impressive array of twitches and neuroses, but they never gel into a personality. The story moves quickly, and it sucked me in, but I didn't particularly enjoy it. Local law enforcement is clueless, corrupt, or both, and the populace is increasingly hostile, so of course Harper has to solve the murder herself so that they can get the hell out of there. Harper easily tracks down the girl's body, but she has barely cashed the check before a fresh murder occurs, forcing her to stay in town until cleared of involvement. Harper and her brother Tolliver make a living doing freelance search and recovery as the book opens, they arrive in a small Ozark mountain town where they've been hired to find a teenage girl who is missing and presumed dead. She can tell if a person was murdered, but not by whom, because otherwise it would be a very short book.

Grave Sight is the first book in a new mystery series about Harper Connelly, who has the unlikely ability to find corpses and sense how they died. She excels at writing about working-class Southerners in small towns. Her books are lightweightīut addictive, with swift pacing and absorbing first-person narration. She's best known to SF readers as the author of the Sookie Stackhouse books about a small-town psychic with a vampire boyfriend, but I've also enjoyed her mystery series.

I read everything by Charlaine Harris that I can get my hands on. Charlaine Harris: Grave Sight Epiphyte Book Review

Grave sight charlaine harris series