Dead to the World by Charlaine Harris

Whoever is editing these books needs to rethink their career choice. First of all there's the numerous omissions of necessary prepositions. I almost didn't make it through the book because of the volume of incomplete sentences. They only needed one extra word to make sense; a "to" or an "of." What do you have against prepositional phrases?

Then, there's the character of Debbie Pelt. Debbie is a shape-shifter and ex-girlfriend to the werewolf who helped Sookie in the last book. She hates Sookie; wants to kill her in fact, but that's not important for this current rant. It's Debbie's job that's the issue. Such a minor detail, but one worth keeping track of for consistency's sake. In Dead to the World, she works in advertising (p. 215,) but in Club Dead she's a legal assistant (p. 123.) Hello, consistency police? Where are you when we need you?!

I've gotten used to the writing style by this point though (one less thing to complain about.) Sookie just over-explains everything and likes to toss in obscure metaphors smack in the middle of the most action-packed sections of the story. Looking past this narrative flaw, the story in Dead to the World is better than Club Dead.

A coven of werewolf witches are attempting a hostile takeover of the Shreveport vampire territory. They've erased Eric's memory and have begun killing vampires and humans working for vampires to establish their dominance. For his safety, Eric is hiding at Sookie's house. So, in a rare occurrence vampires, witches, and werewolves all band together to try and take this evil coven out. All the action relating to this mission takes place at night (of course) so to keep Sookie busy during the day, her brother has gone missing. Sookie is on the trail to track him down, if he's even still alive.

Sookie actually gets time to rest in this book and most of the action builds to a central point rather than bombarding the reader constantly with important action sequences. Sookie doesn't get seriously injured (she really did need a break) and only ends up with one dead body to deal with herself. She's still always in the wrong place at the wrong time, but that's just going to be her luck I figure.

Minus the editing issues, which do weigh heavily on my opinion of the series overall, Dead to the World was a better showing than Harris' prior volume. I've got two more books in the series on the shelf - we'll see how they go when I can bring myself to revisit the hectic world of Sookie Stackhouse.