Club Dead

Book six of the 2010 reading season is the third novel in Charlaine Harris’ series of Sookie Stackhouse novels. I have to be a bit extra-careful about my review of this one – my wife wants to read it and I hate to give spoilers.

We ran into the Sookie Stackhouse universe sort of accidentally. My wife found a couple collections of short stories featuring a bunch of authors that we enjoyed, and there were a couple of Sookie-Universe stories in there that we both liked. After that, it was just a matter of setting the Library Gnomes to work, and the paperbacks started to show up.

I’m going to try for a nutshell summary of the Sookie-Universe, since I read the first two books before I started posting these reviews.

The basic premise of the series is that this is a universe where the supernatural exists, but is carefully hidden from the mundane world. Or at least that was the case until a few years ago when a Japanese company introduced TrueBlood – a synthetic blood substitute that let vampires stop feeding off of humans and go public.

Sookie Stackhouse is a waitress in a bar in small-town Louisiana. She’s also a telepath, with only limited ability to screen out what everyone around her is thinking. When a vampire named Bill moves into town, Sookie discovers that vampires don’t produce the same background noise that makes it tough for her to deal with normal humans.

Hijinx, as they say, ensue.

In Club Dead, Bill and Sookie’s relationship is on shaky ground and things aren’t improved when Bill goes missing. Sookie has to track Bill down while trying to avoid complicated pitfalls in Vampire politics, Vampire / Werewolf relations and her own doubts about what she and Bill really want.

Pages: 292 in paperback

Total page count: 1487

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