Book Review – Grave Surprise

Author: Charlaine Harris
Publisher: Berkley Prime Crime
Binding: Hardcover
Publication Date: 2006

The story concept is that Harper Connelly can sense the dead, discern their names and the cause of death. It’s a fascinating premise. Harper can’t see who causes the death, but she can tell if it was by poison, heart attack, blade, gun, etc. The explanation for this talent is that she was struck by lightening. This was believable as a premise, but unfortunately it was brought up constantly throughout the book. The “woe is me, I was struck by lightening and now have all these problems,” often made no sense considering Harper supposedly enjoyed her job of helping the living find peace.

Character development, such as it was, was generally chaotic. Harper over-explained her actions (and that of other characters) and did so repetitively. Oh, there were moments of brilliance where what the characters did made complete sense, and the story flowed well. The biggest problem was that the relationship between the two main characters (Harper and Tolliver) failed to progress in a reasonable manner. It’s almost as though Harris started out intending the series to be a brother and sister, but halfway through made them completely unrelated—the parent from one having married the parent from the other—throwing the two into a household in their youth. In this book, Harris had to continue the strange relationship and rather than move it forward, it was strung along far too long. The result was confusion and overly simplified reactions. It’s pretty obvious that the two are attracted to one another (which was really confusing in the first book—Grave Sight–when I thought they were siblings!) The whole plot aspect threw me out of the story a number of times.

I’ve read several of Charlaine Harris books; in her earlier works, the characters moved naturally forward in their relationships. In her Vampire/Sookie Stackhouse series and this series, I find the relationships contrived and dragged out so that another book can be written. This chaos is unnecessary. Harris tells a good story and has the ability to propel the plot along quite nicely. As I have said often, I much prefer every book I read to stand on its own. The entire story should be encapsulated—the murder plot should be completed and whatever relationship issue is introduced should be completed. This doesn’t mean that a character or the relationships can’t grow; quite the contrary. It just needs to have a satisfactory and sensible line, rather than a repeated emotional plot. Harris isn’t the only author who is lately guilty of stretching romantic plot devices, and I have to wonder if it might not be the success of the Evanovich series that has editors believing this technique is the way to keep readers buying books.

The good news is that the plot was strong. The scenes where Harper does her thing with dead bodies are excellent. Harris builds tension, suspense and does a good job with foreshadowing. The story contains very interesting side characters. The plot moves along at a good pace. There are multiple suspects and the clues are doled out selfishly, propelling the reader past any problem areas because it is easy to care about the solution. The clues were resolved in a reasonable and satisfactory manner. I did feel it a little rushed towards the end; I would have liked to see more time spent on laying the final ghost to rest—the characters and talent used had greater potential than was realized.

It is the concept of the story, the murder mystery and the possible growth of Harper’s talents and what she can do with those talents that move the story along. It is those things that are likely to bring me back to read another.

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