It’s no secret that I love Charlaine Harris, I think I’ve read over 30 of her books now. But this one has been out for a while and I’m not quite sure why I hadn’t bought it yet. Maybe I knew that once I started reading, one book wouldn’t be enough, because I bought the first 3 all at once.

In this book, you can kind of tell that there’s a lot of setup going on for the next books that will be released, as it does take quite a lot of time before any of the ‘action’ starts, but that’s not to say that the setup is uninteresting. We’re introduced to Manfred, who has newly moved into the town of Midnight, a small underpopulated town in Texas, where most people only stop long enough for the traffic lights to change at the crossroads.

But what was lovely was that Manfred comes from the Harper Connelly books of Harris’ that I previously loved, and I really like the fact that this is a bit of a crossover. Lily Bard from the Shakespeare mysteries also gets a mention too.

What was surprising for a Charlaine Harris novel was that the romance was at an absolute minimum. I kept expecting something to happen between Fiji and one of the other characters, but nothing ever did. Very weird, but not entirely unwanted, I sometimes think that the ‘romance’ can get in the way of the rest of the story.

I’ve been reading the reviews on Goodreads and it seems like this book is getting slated pretty heavily, but I definitely don’t agree with that. It doesn’t have the excitement and drama of the True Blood series, but I really like the more laid-back feel of this book, like the Lily Bard or Aurora Teagarden books.

I can’t wait to find out what happens in the next book, and find out more about some of the strange characters that live in Midnight. I’m sure that’s going to unravel very quickly!