book review
Title: Dead Ever After
Author: Charlaine Harris
# of Pages: 352
Summary (from amazon.com): Sookie Stackhouse finds it easy to turn down the request of former barmaid Arlene when she wants her job back at Merlotte’s. After all, Arlene tried to have Sookie killed. But her relationship with Eric Northman is not so clearcut. He and his vampires are keeping their distance…and a cold silence. And when Sookie learns the reason why, she is devastated. Then a shocking murder rocks Bon Temps, and Sookie is arrested for the crime.
But the evidence against Sookie is weak, and she makes bail. Investigating the killing, she’ll learn that what passes for truth in Bon Temps is only a convenient lie. What passes for justice is more spilled blood. And what passes for love is never enough.
Opinion: When I heard that this novel was going to be the last of this series I was hoping to finally get some kind of conclusion or revelation to the story and characters that I'd followed for 12 books already. Unfortunately for me (and probably lots of readers), all I got was a book that seemed hastily thrown together, characters who completely deviated from the personalities they'd developed over 12 books, and a lazy non-conclusion that just decided to trot out a bunch of old characters to see who's been reading or not. It's not like I hadn't thought the series had gone downhill after Dead As a Doornail, because they did. The quality of the storylines just wasn't the same and the introduction of a bunch of new elements without properly explaining past things was getting out of hand. But this final book was probably the most unsatisfying of them all, not because I wanted a particular ending like many fans of the series, but because I felt it was so rushed and lazy, I would have been willing to wait another year or so for something that resembled a well thought out conclusion that was true to the characters she'd developed and created. But I guess the book series didn't really matter anymore since she's making so much of that royalty cash from True Blood....pity.
Now Reading: The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud
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