Monday, January 30, 2017

Grave Secret by Charlaine Harris

Grave Secret by Charlaine Harris

This is the fourth book in the Harper Connelly series.  I accidentally started reading this series with book 3, but it read well enough and the premise was good so I was hooked.  After that book, I had to read about how Harper's story ended, so I checked this one out right away.  Unfortunately, her story ends on kind of a boring note.

The premise of the series is this:  Harper Connelly was struck by lightning when she was a teenager, and now she can find dead bodies and determine how the person died.  Harper travels with her step-brother Tolliver making money off of her talent and helping people solve mysteries of lost loved ones.  Harper is also hoping to solve her own mystery...the mystery of what happened to her older sister Cameron who went missing 8 years ago.

In this book Harper is called in by the wealthy Joyce family to help determine if their grandfather died of natural causes, or if something else was afoul.  After going to the graveyard, Harper concludes that Rich Joyce (the grandfather) was scared to death by someone, and that his care-giver died due to complications of child birth rather than the general infection that the family thinks killed  her.  Then someone starts to look like they are targeting Harper.  Her brother gets shot, and more people around her stop dying.  Can Harper find the killer before she gets killed?

This is the final book in the series, and not only is there the main mystery, but the book also ties up the mystery of what happened to Harper's sister Cameron.  This book felt a lot like the previous book I read from the series.  There was a lot of time in the hospital, a lot of talk about Harper and Tolliver's childhood, and it just seemed so similar to the former book.  Plus (SPOILER) Harper and Tolliver start dating in book 3, and in this 4th book she keeps referring to him as her brother.  I know that they are only step-siblings, and they didn't become family until they were teenagers, but it is just creepy for her to keep calling the man she is sleeping with her brother.  The resolution to Cameron's mystery seems rushed and anti-climatic.  I was sorry to see the series end on such a down note,

I've read all of Harris's Sookie Stackhouse books, and now I've read through some of this series, I am hoping the next series I read from her has a better denouncement than this one.

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