I'd So Rather Be Reading: Book Review: Grave Sight (Harper Connelly #1) by Charlaine Harris

Summary:

Harper Connelly has what you might call a strange job: she finds dead people. She can sense the final location of a person who's passed, and share their very last moment. The way Harper sees it, she's providing a service to the dead while bringing some closure to the living-but she's used to most people treating her like a blood-sucking leech. Traveling with her step-brother Tolliver as manager and sometime-bodyguard, she's become an expert at getting in, getting paid, and getting out fast. Because for the living it's always urgent-even if the dead can wait forever.

Review:

Thank you to my friend Hannah for recommending this series to me!

I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. After reading Harris' Lily Bard series and Aurora Teagarden series and being disappointed that they weren't as good as her Sookie Stackhouse series, I didn't have high hopes for Grave Sight. However, I was pleasantly surprised. I can't reconcile the differences between Harris' series. How can her Sookie books be so good and the Aurora Teagarden books be so boring? I'm thinking it has to be because the Aurora books were her first series.

Like Sookie, Harper Connelly, our heroine in Grave Sight, has a special skill. She can sense dead people and how they've died. I'm guessing that each book in the Harper series will take us to a different location, as Harper travels across the country either finding bodies or discovering the method of death for a fee of $5,000 a pop. I like that this book was a short mystery which was resolved at the end. I really like how Charlaine Harris ends her series novels. They leave you wanting more but aren't total cliffhangers like so many other authors (think PC Cast's House of Night series and Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games series).

While a little predictable, Grave Sight was entertaining, and in true Harris style, the ending and resolution of the mystery gives the reader a little surprise. I'll definitely be reading more of this series.

Just One Gripe:

I got tired of reading how the characters were dressed. This comes from a self-proclaimed clothes horse, so you know there's a lot of talk about clothes!

The Best Thing About This Book:

One of the characters is named Mariella. I love that name!

Appropriate for a younger audience:

Probably not, as there are multiple descriptions of murders. The descriptions are not grisly, just matter of fact. That's what kept it from being scary, since I usually don't read books about ghosts and the like.