Grave Secret By Charlaine Harris

Images from Chapters.Indigo.caAs an avid (or is that rabid?) Sookie Stackhouse fan, I've been constantly looking for books of equal quality to fill my time between installments. When I read the first book in the Harper Connelly series I was immediately hooked. Charlaine Harris is a wonderful writer –her characters are richly layered and her background in amateur sleuth novels always promises a gripping read.

Harper's got a gift in the same vein as Sookie. But instead of reading other people's minds she can read the last moment of a dead person's life. And unlike Sookie, Harper wasn't born with this gift–it was a side affect of being hit by lightning.

She's turned this gift into a job and goes state to state with Tolliver trying to give peace to the families that hire her to find out more about their beloved deceased. Usually these deaths turn out to have more than meets the eye and Harper ends up knee deep in mystery. The fourth book in this series is no exception.

Harper and Tolliver are settling into their new relationship as a couple and it's only fitting that this is the novel where their troubled family past finally comes to the forefront. They're back in Texas, their home state, visiting their two young sisters who were adopted by their aunt and uncle, running into Tolliver's recently released ex-convict father, and meeting up with the detective who has never stopped helping them look for their missing sister Cameron.

I thought this was going to be the craziest, most emotionally involved story yet. There were some good things set in place to start the drama ball rolling, like when Tolliver becomes bedridden and Harper has to go out on her own. I thought this was going to be really significant, because there's always been a lot of emphasis placed on how much Harper relies on Tolliver and how she couldn't do a lot of the things she does without him. But the theme didn't really seem to pan out.

In fact, "not panning out" seemed to be the biggest theme in the book. The mystery Harper gets involved with at the beginning never becomes as tangled and heart-thumping as we've come to expect and the relationships between Tolliver and his father and Harper and Iona don't really get resolved. But the biggest let down by far was the Cameron mystery. It seemed to only really occupy the end of the book and it felt more like a device used to bring more gravitas to the plot...but a little to late and without much impact.

The book wasn't bad, but I've just come to expect such well-thought out mysteries from Charlaine Harris and considering that this seems to be the final book in the series, I felt the characters deserved a much bigger and more thorough send off.

Was it worth the read?

Yes. Even a mediocre Charlaine Harris book is a good book. I just hope she hones her series finale writing skills before she finishes the Sookie books!