Dead Reckoning by Charlaine Harris, UK edition cover.
Title: Dead Reckoning
Author: Charlaine Harris
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Publication Date: 3rd May 2011
Blurb:
There’s a reckoning on the way . . .
Sookie Stackhouse is a cocktail waitress in Bon Temps, Louisiana. It’s a job which has its own challenges, but now the vampires and the shapeshifters are finally ‘out’, you’d think the supernaturals would get on with each other. But nothing is simple in Bon Temps!
. . . and Sookie has a knack for being in trouble’s way; not least when she witnesses the firebombing of Merlotte’s, the bar where she works. Since Sam Merlotte is known to be two-natured, suspicion immediately falls on the anti-shifters in the area. Sookie suspects otherwise, but before she can investigate something else – even more dangerous – comes up.
Sookie’s lover Eric Northman and his ‘child’ Pam are plotting something in secret. Whatever it is, they seem determined to keep Sookie out of it; almost as determined as Sookie is to find out what’s going on. She can’t sit on the sidelines when both her work and her love life are under threat – but as their plans gradually become clear Sookie finds the situation is deadlier than she could have imagined.
Rating: *** (3 stars)
Review:
Dead Reckoning is the eleventh book in Charlaine Harris’s best-selling Sookie Stackhouse series, and it follow on pretty much from where the previous book in the series left off. This is not the place to start if you are new to the series. I have been a fan of this series for a while, and I really looked forward to reading this latest installment.
For me this book did not live up to my expectations. It reads more as a build up for the next book in the series, than as a good solid book itself. Harris posed so many questions throughout this book, and so few of them were answered that I was left feeling a little bewildered by the end. It is a great set-up for the next book in the series and it is a great read in parts. Sookie still has her wonderful slightly sarcastic tone as she narrates the events of the novel. There is a mystery posed at the beginning of the book which is solved by the end of it. The story is filled with lots of plots and counter-plots. Once I started reading the book, I just couldn’t put it down. Yet, I walked away from this book disappointed.
I don’t want to give too much away because I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone, so I’m deliberately going to be vague. Harris sets up around five major plot arcs in the novel, which are all very interesting and create huge questions about current, past and future events. Very few of these arcs are fully resolved in the book. Whilst I’m all for foreshadowing in a series – it is after all, what makes us read the next book – I would have loved a few more resolutions.
I can’t wait for the next book in the series, if the foreshadowing in this one is anything to go by.
