Grave Sight By Charlaine Harris

Grave Sight
Charlaine Harris
Paperback 293
Berkley












Amazon blurb -

Ever since Harper Connelly survived a zap from a lightning bolt, she's been able to find dead people, a skill that makes the protagonist in the first installment of Harris's new series a tad more bizarre than the mind-reading heroine of the author's Sookie Stackhouse books (Dead as a Doornail, etc.). Harper travels to the Ozark town of Sarne, Ark., to find a missing teenage girl's body, accompanied by her stepbrother, Tolliver, who acts as her manager and bodyguard and with whom she shares a thinly disguised physical attraction that they manage to keep at bay by engaging in casual sex with various partners. Finding the body takes no time at all, but leaving town afterward isn't so easy. When Harper's life is threatened and Tolliver ends up in jail on trumped-up charges, it quickly becomes apparent that something sinister is going on in Sarne. Harris delivers a knuckle-gnawing tale populated with well-developed, albeit edgy characters. A nifty puzzle toward the end will challenge the most jaded mystery buffs.
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I really really liked this book.  Very quick, easy, light,  yet not boring or simple.  Harper Connelly has a "gift" of being able to "hear" how people have died.  They call to her and she literally vibrates with the energy of them.  When she is near their bodies, she will actually see how their last moments on this earth were.  She can't see who did them harm if that was the case, but she does feel what they felt.  Her step-brother Tolliver is her side kick and he is ultra protective of her.  I loved seeing how they interact together.  Harper gets very frightened in storms, that's how she got her gift - being struck by lightening.  He comes to her side immediately and that was very touching.

Many doubt  her gift thinking she's a phony, and many are angry to pay her for her service, and this aggravates both her and Tolliver.   Understandable as she tries to explain this to a young 16 yr old Mary Nell whose brother Harper has freed from the suspicion of suicide, that she would expect to be paid if she were a therapist. 

As their stay in the town gets more convoluted with more of the dead piping up to poor Harper, it seems someone in the town does not want her there anymore and some very nasty things start happening.  This takes place in a somewhat backwards small and small minded southern town where they think she is evil.  The suspense is building all the way to someone actually shooting at her!  I had my suspicions as to the who, but it didn't take away from the fun of this book.

Miss Charlaine is just a great author in my opinion.  She crafts great characters that you really want to know better.  When I can breeze through a book and feel really good reading it, that author is aces for me.  I will most definitely continue on with the next in this series Grave Surprise.

My Rating - 3 1/2 cannolis