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Book Review of Grave Sight (Harper Connelly, Bk 1)

Grave Sight (Harper Connelly, Bk 1)
jane1817 avatar reviewed on + 6 more book reviews


This book, and its author, were a complete surprise to me. Friends suggest I must have been living in a Greenland research station to have missed Charlaine Harris' wildly popular books but the truth is that I've been doing a 'Jane Austen retrospective'in recent years. It was a short sprint, I suppose, from dead authors to an "I see dead people" novel, but it wasn't that aspect of Grave Sight (however clever) that delighted me. As a native Southerner, nothing riles me faster'n than authors who write about Southern people, landscapes, and customs without really knowing much about them. Grave Sight, however, has the stamp of authenticity about it. The characters, the dialogue, the settings, the quirks and lifeways and encounters that make up the books: well, of course, they're fictional, since no one I ever heard of told the local sheriff where to find a dumped body because they could sense the grave and the last few seconds of the victim's life. But they nevertheless feel credible to such an extent that after the first few pages you stop thinking Grave Sight is fiction and start taking in the narrative like a story you're hearing from a friend.