Dead Ever After by Charlaine Harris book review.
From the moment a vampire walked into a bar, readers have been hooked on Charlaine Harris’s stories about telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse. She’s been attacked by psychotic werewolves, caught in a hotel explosion caused by anti-vampirism activists, nearly crucified by religious extremists and tortured by fairies. Now Harris is bringing Sookie’s story to an end.
The series has been fading for a while. From the eighth book in the series ( From Dead To Worse ) onwards, the plots have been increasingly Sookie-centric, and the repeated games of “Who wants to kill our heroine?’ were getting tiresome.
Dead Ever After again centres on a threat to Sookie. It’s not particularly intriguing. The central plot is really just an excuse for Harris to bring back various characters and give them their happy endings or suitably gruesome deaths, tying up all the loose ends.
And you may not like the endings certain characters get. One who’s been particularly prominent throughout the series gets a couple of brief cameos and is then written out. Given Sookie’s relationship with this individual, it’s startling how little she seems to care. The vampires, who were central to the series from the start, get more or less brushed over. People Sookie loved or hated passionately a few books previously get waved off and she gives them barely a second thought. Others who posed massive threats to her suddenly, magically, no longer do. It makes for an end to the series that is flat, out of character and ultimately unsatisfying.
Miriam McDonald twitter.com/crinolinerobot
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