I found this book while wandering around the HBLL, following a couple of people from my acting class as they tried to find a copy of the play we're doing a scene from. The new look and bright colors stood out from the usual HBLL fare - scuffed, a bit bent, and mostly pasted inside special one-color covers. I picked it up and read a page or two before following my classmates to the next shelf. Much to my surprise, the book was still in my hands when I got downstairs, so I decided I might as well check it out. And then when I got home I read it instead of doing homework. Oops.
The first thing I will say is that the premise is really very interesting. The main character, Harper Connelly, was struck by lightning when she was a teenager and now has the ability to sense where corpses are and, upon getting close enough, witness their final moments. A horrid poverty-stricken past and lack of marketable skills leads Harper to turn this strange ability into a job, with her stepbrother Tolliver coming along to act as bodyguard, support, companionship, and someone to run the check to the bank to keep the person who hired Harper from changing his or her mind about paying. (Apparently many people don't like being told how their loved ones died, despite hiring Harper to find out; the book includes a scene with an old woman who is firmly convinced her husband was killed by his ex-wife and nearly becomes hysterical when Harper informs her that the cat did it.)
This lifestyle requires Harper and Tolliver to be almost constantly on the move, especially since Harper has a "get in, find body, get out" mentality. However, when they are called to the town of Sarne to find the body of a teenaged girl, Teenie, things are a bit more difficult than usual. Teenie's been missing for over six months, and many assume her body is somewhere in the woods near where her boyfriend was found shot. The boyfriend's mother wants to clear up the town rumor that the boy killed his Teenie and then shot himself. But when Harper finds the body and tells everyone that Teenie was definitely murdered, and almost certainly not by her boyfriend, she and her brother find themselves in danger.
I did a bit of searching before starting to write this, and I was quite surprised to find out that, while this is the first book of the Harper Connelly mysteries, Charlaine Harris was already a well-established author when it was published. The plot line is rather a good one, but the writing seems rather amateur to me. For example, this paragraph: "Tolliver tossed down the aged magazine he'd been riffling through. He pushed himself up from the fake-leather chair. Tolliver's twenty-seven. His mustache has a reddish cast; otherwise, his hair is as black as mine" (Grave Sight pg. 5). First of all, that description of Tolliver's hair color comes out of nowhere, even when read with the rest of the page, and it goes nowhere. We get two sentences about hair color and then back to the plot. It's sudden and unnecessary. Secondly, this paragraph has is but one example of the flow problems that pop up here and there throughout the whole book. Notice that the first three sentences have no pauses and are all rather short. This similarity between them disrupts flow and can knock a reader out of the book, which is what happened to me several times. Very few things annoy me as much as being distracted while trying to read a good book, especially when the distraction is a problem with the book itself.
Even with that, however, this is definitely on my Recommended list. The plot is engaging, the characters are interesting (though a couple of the minor ones are a bit flat), and I love the talent that Harper has.
Does include profanity and one slightly descriptive sex scene.
Grave Sight by Charlaine Harris: 4/5
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