Grade: A-

I’m a sicko. What drew me to this book is the supposedly tooclose relationship between the heroine Harper Connelly and her step-brother, Tolliver Lang. Yes, yes, I’m a pervert. You tell me there’s Jerry Springer action in a book and I’m on it. What can I say, I love the salacious shit. I will tell you, dear readers, that even though Harper is a little too dependent on her brother, nothing lewd and gross happens between them (damn!). In fact, there was hardly any sexual tension between them (as it should be), and I found myself enjoying this book more than I thought I would. First of all, Charlaine Harris is a top-notch writer, as you Sookie Stackhouse fans know. This particular series is a little more somber and a little “graver” (ha ha ha) than Sookie’s series, but damn, I dug it. Harper is an awesome heroine: she’s smarter than she looks, clever, quick on her feet, and she doesn’t mind kicking a little ass. Tolliver is an excellent foil for her; he looks after her, is quite protective of her, but is more of Harper’s sidekick than her partner. The plot itself is pretty tight. Though not necessarily devoid of cliches, the story unfolds in a little town in Arkansas that is seemingly perfect, but actually has some serious Peyton Place shit going on. It’s your basic “small town with secrets” storyline, but Charlaine Harris makes it all seem new and Harper doing her Nancy Drew-crossed-with-Miss Cleo routine gives it an added twist. Harris is quite adept at writing the sleuthing scenes as well as the big-reveals, so none of it was too cheesy. I was also pleasantly surprised at Harris’s handling of Harper’s love interest. Harper seems to be the kind of gal who has a boy in every port and doesn’t mind loving and leaving them. There isn’t a lot of whingeing and hand-wringing on her part; she’s just very grown-up about it. All and all, I was thrilled with how much I loved this book.

Twenty-four-year old Harper Connelly has a very special talent: she can find corpses. When she was fifteen years old, a lightning bolt went through the pipes of her house and Harper, who was standing before a bathroom mirror doing her hair, was zapped through the curling iron she held in her hand. Though she gets bad headaches during electrical storms as well as major arthritis on her right leg, Harper’s done pretty well for herself going from town to town, helping cops as well as civilians find bodies (she can’t find ‘em if they’re not dead) and getting paid pretty well for it, too. Her step-brother, Tolliver Lang, travels with her and is always on hand to help her out. Tolliver is her assistant slash business manager slash father-figure slash sleuthing buddy. They became very close when Harper’s crackwhore mommy married Tolliver’s crackwhore daddy and the two of them were forced to take care of their younger siblings. After Harper’s mom dies of AIDS and Tolliver’s dad goes to jail, well-meaning but asshole relatives take away their younger siblings and Harper and Tolliver are left to take care of each other. Since neither of them have actual marketable skills, they decide to capitalize on Harper’s new talent and get money from people looking for missing corpses. Harper gets relatively famous at what she does and her reputation gets the two of them called to a small town called Sarne, Arkansas, where a wealthy woman named Sybil is looking to clear her dead son of a murder-suicide rap on his missing girlfriend. Harper and Tolliver arrive in town and Harper immediately finds out that Dell, the woman’s son, did not kill his girlfriend or himself. There is an unnamed, unknown killer in Sarne and it does not sit well with the townsfolk. The longer the two of them stay in Sarne, the more unsavory info H & T find out about its townsfolk, and Harper suddenly seems to be finding info on bodies no one hired her to find. One of those bodies belongs to the wife of Hollis Boxleitner, a deputy who looks too damn good in his cop’s uniform, but may have a few dark secrets of his own.

The character of Harper is very odd. Though she is obviously intelligent and can get herself out of trouble, she is freakishly dependent on her brother who makes sure that she eats on time, gets enough sleep, and accompanies her everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Sometimes they even share a room. Sure, the two of them had a hellish childhood together and one might say that they became very close because they could depend on no one else, but I think there is something else going on here. For instance, Harper totally freaks out and has panic attacks when she can’t immediately get a hold of Tolliver and the two of them seem to have a bond that transcends a brother-sister relationship or even romantic love. Harper is quite clingy to Tolliver and he doesn’t seem to mind. Tolliver is Harper’s security blanket and night light; without him, she seems to be a quivering mass of goo that can’t do anything for herself. Though Harper does manage to pull herself together long enough to get Tolliver out of a jam, she is otherwise useless without him. Instead of being disgusted with her, I found myself more fascinated with her attachment to Tolliver more than anything. Harper isn’t a defenseless, weak female by any means; she is strong and smart, yet clings to Tolliver like static. I think it’s because Tolliver is the only thing that’s ever been stable in her life, so she has convinced herself over the years that she will be quite lost without him. Sure, she’s damaged, but Tolliver is plenty damaged himself. I am really looking forward to Ms. Harris exploring their relationship in subsequent books (not like that, you perverts!).

Tolliver is a pretty interesting character himself. Though he seems to be smart and quite capable of taking care of himself, he chooses to stick to Harper like glue, even setting his own life aside to follow her from town to town. The character of Tolliver is charming and has no problems getting with the ladies (though I’m pretty worried that he seems to be nailing truckstop whores indiscriminately), yet he seems to be quite dependent on Harper too. After all, according to him, if he weren’t tagging along with Harper, he would probably be working at Home Depot as the manager of fixtures or something. His need to align himself with Harper seems to stem from his own insecurities; I wouldn’t say he’s using her, per se, but I think Tolliver just doesn’t want to settle down in a little town with a wife and some dead-end job (though he certainly hints that he does). Though Tolliver may seem like he is only mooching off of Harper’s talent on the surface, he really does make himself useful to her. He is her bodyguard, her business manager, her caregiver, and her goddamn rock, yo! The two of them really work together because they are both so damaged that they wouldn’t make sense to anyone else but each other. I’d be interested to know where Ms. Harris intends to take this relationship, even for the complete and utter mindfuck of it, if not for the ick factor. Tolliver and Harper are just so damned interesting together that I can’t wait to find out what happens next.

The story itself is pleasantly paced. We find out a little about Harper and Tolliver’s childhood (Harper has an older sister Cameron who was abducted and possibly murdered, but she hopes to find her body someday), but we are not overwhelmed with the details. Harper is a dependable narrator in which she doesn’t gloss over their past, but she doesn’t inundate us with information, either. We can sense that she’s bitter about her childhood, but it doesn’t hamper the flow of the plot or her own character development. She gets involved with Hollis, a deputy involved with the case, but she doesn’t allow her relationship with him to influence her decisions, and when it’s time to cut bait and go, she does it cleanly. For a girl who can “talk” to dead people and is quite possibly emotionally stunted, she really is very mature about it. She isn’t just psychic-girl, but is also a convincing detective on her own right. She and Tolliver actually work really well together and I did like that they do real investigative work instead of letting shit fall into their laps. There is pretty good suspense surrounding the mystery they are trying to solve, but there’s some funny stuff, too. For instance, a teenage girl named Mary Nell, the younger sister of Dell the murdered boy, falls madly in love with Tolliver and stalks him a little bit. There are also some pretty creepy characters on hand here, mainly Paul Edwards, the town lawyer who seems to know everything there is know about everyone and shows up out of nowhere at inopportune times, and Vernon, the owner of the motel that H & T stay at and likes to quote “Thou shall not suffer a witch to live” at Harper.

What I really enjoyed about this book is the slow, yet kind of creepy unfolding of the dramatic events. Ms. Harris serves the Mystery of the Week as a puzzle and we get the same clues as H & T, so we can figure things out for ourselves. There is no a-ha! moment or a twist ending where the author seems to have pulled the reasoning behind it out of her ass, but it all unfolds in a way that make sense. Everything just connects. If you pay attention to the clues as well as the details that Ms. Harris provides for us, the big-reveal is all the more satisfying because she really does lay it all out for her reader. There is no deus-ex-machina or anything like that; it’s all just solid detective work. Because of that, however, it really does feel kind of like a “dinner theater mystery,” but it’s really enjoyable and doesn’t take itself too seriously. My main complaint about this book is Tolliver himself. As much as I liked him, I really wish we had gotten more of him. Because this story is told in a first-person narrative from Harper’s point of view, we really don’t get much in a way of his thoughts and I really would like to think what Tolliver himself thinks of Harper and their way of life. Unfortunately, Tolliver isn’t as talkative as Harper, so I couldn’t get a full bead on him. I hope this is fixed in the subsequent books and we get more of Tolliver in a way of character development. Other than that, this is really a solidly written mystery with a pretty enjoyable plot and likeable characters. If you’re a fan of Ms. Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series, you really ought to check this book out. I think you’ll like it. Harper is a little more somber than Sookie, but she does have Sookie’s sense of humor, plus there’s none of that everyone-loves-Sookie Mary Sue bullshit that’s starting to annoy me. But then again, this is just the beginning of the series, so who knows.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 1st, 2006 at 10:33 am and is filed under Books, Grade: A, Suspense/Mystery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.