Harper Connelly can find dead people, and see the last moments of thier lives and determine how they died. That's the extent of her gift, though. She never sees the killer, and is forced to piece together the mystery puzzles like everyone else. Travelling with her step-brother, Tolliver, she's generally not well-liked, thought of a fraud or trouble-maker, all of which complicates her mystery solving.

Fans of Charlaine Harris, some cozy mystery fans (this contains a fair bit of sex, though it's pretty boring sex), someone wanting a really quick read on a flight, train or other few-hour trip.

A very generous 2.5 stars and I don’t even know why. I guess because I finished it, in one sitting, and didn’t really reflect on it until later. If I would have stopped partway through, I likely wouldn’t have finished it.

So let’s back up. I loved the first few Sookie books. Loved them. The series, unfortunately, devolved into a bland anti-climatic fizz-out, but I finished it because I was committed to the series.

I will not be committing to Harper Connelly, or her weird brother, or the most boring dead people I’ve ever encountered. I’m not committing to the flat, stereotypical characters found in the flat stereotypical town. This series falls into ‘one…and done’ for me.

It starts off okay, then loses momentum about 1/3 of the way in, when you realize that the characters aren’t going to have any more depth than you’ve already been given, the Harper is kind of annoyingly flat, and that her relationship with her brother is just…off. Off-putting, actually. The kindest way to describe this entire plot (both of Harper and her brother AND the actual storyline of the book) is “dime-store knockoff of VC Andrews”.

Then a little further in, even giving Harper and her brother the benefit of the doubt, in that they aren’t ‘investigators’, you realize they’re actually pretty stupid.

The writing itself was mediocre at best, but not unreadable. The plot was exceptionally weak and as such, oddities really stuck out. For example, Harper is a ‘list-maker’. Really? She makes one list. A group of teenage thugs go after Harper and her brother. They don’t succeed. Later, they attack Harper alone and they are “incongruously wearing football jackets”. What is incongruous about that, exactly? Teenage bullies in a small town that happen to be on the football team? That isn’t incongruous, that’s a cliché. There were several other editing mistakes that I was surprised to find.

On top of the weak plot, the backstories of every single character was so bloody melodramatic I felt like I should swoon onto a fainting couch. Everyone’s mothers/father/sister/brother/uncle/aunt is a drunk, an addict, a wild child, and just about everyone in anybody’s life is dead. Seriously, I can suspend my disbelief pretty far, but come on now.

In the end, even though Harper is telling the story, it reads like a third-person narrative and it’s pretty darn boring. Even the sex is boring. Usually I’m firmly in one camp: either the sex scenes were well done, or they were not. These were…nothing.

I felt nothing towards this book as a whole, but as I said, it was somewhat readable and it killed a few hours.

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Created Dec 18, 2017 at 6:09pm • Submit your own review...