Paperback: 9780425224243, $7.99

An Ice Cold Grave is the third book in Harris’ Harper Connelly series, a dark mystery with feather-light touches of paranormal. For those who haven’t encountered it before Harper is a woman who gained the uncanny ability to sense the dead and read their last moment after being hit by lightning. After surviving a horrible, abusive childhood she and her step brother Tolliver travel around using her talent to survive.

In An Ice Cold Grave Harper and Tolliver have been called to Doraville, North Carolina where a woman, angry at the past sheriff’s handling of the disappearances of several teen boys, asks Harper to find the bodies of the boys that surely must be dead by now. Harper begins her hunt, and to her horror finds not only the six missing boys, but two others as well, all buried in what looks suspiciously like a serial killer’s dumping grounds.

Suddenly Harper finds herself not just blackmailed into staying nearby by the newly appointed sheriff, but a target of the serial killer’s outrage.

As usual Harris offers a tale that features a delicate thread of darkness. There is true horror in this book, but by the characters trying to block it out, move past it and not dwelling on it, even when it rises up and tries to claim them, it becomes secondary, and undertow rather than a flood of dark themes. The characters are Harris’ strength. They are complex, easy to sympathize with and as a reader you find yourself wanting things to work out for them.

This particular book is more scattered than the previous books, but it reflects the complexity of the serial killer nature. Despite the attention focused on Harris’ other series, this is her best. An Ice Cold Grave is satisfying, page turner that fans of dark fiction should definitely give a chance.

Grave Surprise is the second book in the Harper Connelly series from Charlaine Harris. Harper is a woman with a bad past, the most obvious event being the day she was struck by lightning, leaving her with a myriad of small damages and the ability to find the dead. Unlike in other urban fantasies Harper is one of, if not the, only person in the world to have a psychic power. She and her brother, Tolliver who acts as her manager, travel the states working cases where people, or their bodies, are missing.

In Grave Surprise Harper has been hired to do a demonstration for a college professor’s class on psychics. Sure that he’s called her there to debunk her instead Harper names the occupants and cause of deaths for a little graveyard with stunning accuracy, right down to finding a new grave, a grave on top of an older grave. The newest addition the the cemetery is an eleven year old girl that Harper herself was hired to find a year ago.

The find is stunning enough for the Memphis PD, but the fact that Harper already worked the girl’s case, and that the parents moved from the city where their daughter was abducted to Memphis, not far from the graveyard, makes the local cops suspect Harper and her brother and they suspect they’ve been set up.

Harris is a veteran mystery writer more popular for her Southern Vampire series, but with the Harper Connelly books she’s turned back to her mystery roots creating a world that’s a strange combination of real and dark. The cover of Grave Surprise (first US mass market edition) features a skulled jack-in-the-box popping out of an open grave. It matches the feel of the book perfectly, implying that this world inside should be bright and whimsical, but never quite makes it out the dark shadows. Likewise Harper and her brother are both trying to help people, and trying to shed the memories of an abusive past, and instead seem to be trapped by subtle chains, like depression and fears, into living dark lives.

This is the best book in the series so far, the plot is sneaky and more compelling than the first, but just as well written and unnerving. While Harris’ other books might appeal to a more romance-oriented crowd this series has the potential to draw in fans who never thought they’d like a book like this, proving that Harris and her work should not be dismissed as another in a line of trend writers.