Grade: A-

And here’s yet another adventure from the brother and sister psychic detective team who like each other a little too much. Yay! No, perverts, they still don’t have sex in this one, but our heroine Harper Connelly does look at her brother Tolliver a little inappropriately this time and the seeds of quasi-incest love have been planted in her lightning-fried brain. She’s even begun to tell people that she and Tolliver are not brother and sister, but BFF. This change in Harper is facilitated by someone who mistakenly identifies them as lovers and asks if they have children together. Ewww! But this totally freaks out Harper and she is understandably unable to tell Tolliver why she can’t look him in the eye. Tolliver appears oblivious to Harper’s pre-incestuous crises, but since we don’t get anything from Tolliver’s point of view, we can’t possibly know what he’s thinking. Speaking of Tolliver, we get another affirmation of his utter irresistability to women when yet another woman throws herself at him like a crazy person. For realz, yo, Charlaine describes him as a sullen, black-haired pockmarked dude (the sullen and black-haired part sounds hot, but nay on the pockmarks). Does that sound hot to you? Is Ms. Harris just setting the stage for Harper inevitably throwing herself at the altar of Tolliver worship? Eww and ooh at the same time.

This 2nd book of the series picks up immediately from the previous book. Harper and Tolliver are invited to Bingham College in Nashville where a college professor awaits to debunk Harper’s abilities. Clyde Nunley, the professor, teaches occult studies and often invites so-called psychics to his classes in order to show his students that they are nothing but big ole fakers. Nunley wants Harper to walk over each and every grave at a local cemetary and identify the cause of death of each person (the death records had been previously sealed and only Nunley has had access to them). Harper stops at one particular grave and identifies the dead as a little girl who died of asphyxiation. Nunley screams “wrong!” in her face and tells her that an old man is interred there and had died a million years ago (or something). Nunley cackles with glee, calls Harper a fraud, and gets ready to verbally eviscrate her in front of his students but wait! Harper is never wrong! The local cops are called in to dig up the grave and who do they find but Tabitha Morgenstern, the only body Harper had ever failed to find. Naturally, Harper and Tolliver become the main suspects, so the two of them are forced to stay in town to ferret out the identity of the real killer. As if that’s not enough, Clyde Nunley is murdered and dumped in the same grave immediately after an altercation with Harper. Obviously there is someone setting them up for a rap, but who?

As with the previous book, the writing is very crisp and the plot itself is well-paced. Ms. Harris’s trademark dry wit and talent with character development are very present here. We learn more about Harper and her strained relationship with her younger siblings. We see Harper and Tolliver trying to reach out to them only to be waylaid by a bitchy aunt who thinks they’re a bad influence on them. What is especially striking in this book is Harper’s heartbreak and inward yearning for normalcy. She wants to know what it would be like to settle down somewhere with Tolliver (heh-heh) in a quiet little house and live a quiet little life. The only problem is she actually likes what she’s doing and can’t imagine doing anything else. Oh, and it’s not like she and Tolliver are trained to do anything else, so they wouldn’t be making the same amount of money. She also begins to question if she is holding Tolliver back and if he wouldn’t be better off living away from her with a nice girl somewhere. On top of that, she contemplates her possible attraction to Tolliver and castigates herself for feeling something so, so, so wrong. Dude, Harper got major issues. Tolliver, on the other hand, seems to be unable to keep his penis in his pants. The situation they’re in is further complicated by the fact that one of the women he had boned in the past just happens to be the aunt of Tabitha Morgenstern, the dead girl. I’m starting to think that Tolliver is just boning these chicks to keep his mind off of Harper. After all, the two of them are together almost every minute of the day. If that ain’t the reason, then Tolliver is just a big ole slut and… eww. I like my male sluts tortured and banging chicks indiscriminately for a reason, thank you.

The plot of this book has shades of the Jon Benet murder. Tabitha is older than Jon Benet, but she is a beauty queen type and disappears from the security of her own home. Naturally, the cops focus their investigation on the family: the overly charming father, the oddly cheery mother who gets immediately pregnant after the murder, and the sullen, suspicious-acting older brother who obviously has a secret. Oh, and let’s not forget the vindictive aunt who has her own motives for bringing Harper to the case, the drunken grampa, and the strangely standoffish uncle who seems to be an outsider to this big crazy family. I do like the way Ms. Harris shows how a murder of a close family member affects a family and the way their connections to each other slowly unravel or disintegrate. She does a good job of it. Very creepy. Couldn’t help thinking the girl might have been better off. It’s all very V.C. Andrews. Ms. Harris is really very good at this Southern gothic stuff and I can’t get enough of it.

This book was a quick, pleasant, yet creepy read for me. I devoured each page with gusto and finished it all in one sitting. I think this series could be potentially better than the Sookie Stackhouse series because Harper is such an interesting character study. She is very flawed and is probably not in danger of falling into a Mary Sue trap any time soon (she really got major issues, yo). She’s just so frickin’ complex… she’s a well of fucked-up psychological damage and I’m really looking forward to Ms. Harris dissecting her issues for all of her readers to see. I am also quite fascinated with the salaciousness of her quasi-incestuous attraction to her brother Tolliver and can’t wait to see what happens next. Yes, I’m a shipper hag, shut up. If the whole Harper-Tolliver thing skeeves you out (what are you doing on this site, then?), then read it for the mystery aspect of it. As I’ve mentioned before, Ms. Harris writes tightly plotted mysteries that are very engaging and fun to read. Oh science, the next book of this series can’t come soon enough!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 at 11:15 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.