Harper Connolly is honest, ethical and loyal – and ever since a bolt of lightning zapped her on the head, she’s had an extra-special talent: she can find dead people. It’s not a common-or-garden job. Some people find Harper’s talent useful and fascinating, but she’s getting to most people treating her like a blood-sucking leech. She’s become an expert at getting in, getting paid and getting out, fast.
When Harper and her stepbrother Tolliver travel to the Ozarks to find a local teenager, missing, believed dead, they discover that someone is willing to go to great lengths to bury a secret.
The summary in the back tells quite well what this work is about. Harper Connolly has the ability to sense the last experiences of corpses. Therefore she also perceives when a dead body is near by its last memories. However, she is not able to communicate with dead people, see who murdered them or any other kind of medium abilities. She and her stepbrother travel through the USA, to where they are hired by people who pay for Harper’s services: finding dead bodies and discover the cause of death.
This is an all-American work, about all-American people aimed to all-American readers.
The story is a crime plot, which is told in a direct straight-forward way, without any literary embellishments. The characters are all-American people, and it is hard for a European reader to feel some sort of identification with them. Also, there are no characters deep enough to become really interesting. Even Harper, who the author took great care to remark that was intellectually superior to the other characters, seems quite shallow.
By this book, the Harper Connolly series seems very similar to the Sookie Stackhouse series in the kind of characters, way of writing and sense of humor, but the Sookie series feels more special for the higher amount of fantasy elements, and the way it makes the characters more appealing.
Grave Sight is entertaining, easy and fast to read, but feels too light.
[...] – Grave Sight (Harper Connolly Mysteries, Book 1) – Charlaine Harris (Der Wanderer) [...]