From Sookie Stackhouse to Harper Connelly

I finished the last Sookie Stackhouse tale, Dead and Gone last weekend, so I'm forced to wait until October for Charlaine Harris' next installment, A Touch of Dead.

I realize the following just proves how unexciting my life is, but I've since finished two more books, one of them being Harris' first in the Harper Connelly series, Grave Sight.

I enjoyed Grave Sight - I finished it in one sitting - and I've already gotten the second book, Grave Surprise from the local library. The third is on its way for me to pick up at the library this week.

The first Harper Connelly book was far more PG than the Sookie series, which doesn't really matter to me other than the fact that most of the sex in novels doesn't really add to the plot in a meaningful way. Therefore, the lack of it means there's less fluff to the pages and more pertinent information to keep me interested.

Grave Sight was a bit shorter than most of the Sookie books - under 300 pages - but there was a lot less meaningless text in GS than in some of the Sookie series. Don't get me wrong, I loved the Sookie books, but towards the end of some of them I wanted to scream because a great deal of the last 20-30 pages were completely unnecessary. I'd find myself skimming out of impatience and if I went back to thoroughly read the pages I'd skimmed, I found that they were in fact pages that could easily be skipped all together.

While Sookie's tales revolve around vampires and other various "were-animals," the Harper Connelly series has humans at the heart of its stories.

Harper was struck by lightning when she was a teenager and as a result she can locate dead people - she describes her "sense" as a buzzing she feels when she's close to a dead body. She can't see who killed the victim (in the case of murder) but she can see how each victim died. In fact, when in proximity to the site of the victim's death, she psychologically lives out their last few moments.

Harper's step-brother, Tolliver, is more like a business manager and body guard than anything else.

I find Harper and Tolliver's relationship a little weird - I know they are only "step" brother and sister, but their affection for each other seems almost inappropriate, but hasn't subtracted from my enjoyment of the story. I'm hoping there is some explanation coming in the following books for Harper's strange "need" for her brother.

There is a fourth Harper Connelly book due out in October. Charlaine Harris sure is some kind of writing machine!