by Charlaine Harris
Penguin, $27.95, 336 pages
The anxiously awaited eleventh novel of the Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampire saga and (HBO’s True Blood) series, Dead Reckoning finally made its debut to highly jittery fans. In this book, the story picks up with a fire bomb one night in Sam’s bar. Sookie’s not sure but she suspects it was a vampire who threw it through the window, setting the place ablaze and causing injury to some of the staff and patrons. She’s decided to clean out the attic of her family home and begins a quest to find her roots and put to rest the nagging question of who she is and where she came from.
Charlaine Harris is a master of storytelling with this crafty and wildly popular series. Readers can pick right up where they left off in the last Sookie book or, if you’ve been living under a rock for the last two years, you’ll still know what’s going on. The characters remain well fleshed-out and believable. As with the entire Sookie tales, caution to those young readers out there that this series is not for everyone. Graphic scenes of violence and gore, species racial issues and sexual content fill the pages to entertain those with strong stomachs and a yearning for intrigue!