Grave Surprise (Harper Connelly, #2)

by Charlaine Harris

[jesstheaudiobookworm]

Grave Surprise was the installment that change the way I viewed the series. There were plenty of words eaten from my first review. And Grave Surprise certainly dispelled the notion of this being a cozy mystery series. The tone shifted to something much more intense and unsettling, more reminiscent of horror.

Grave Surprise was also where romantic shenanigans of a Greg and Marcia Brady variety began to appear. In my review of the first installment, I expressed delight and relief that Harris seems content to have the two main characters remain in a step-sibling role. It was indeed refreshing, until it wasn’t. Ick factor aside, the romance was developed quite nicely. There was plenty of internal struggle, which seemed realistic, given the situation. Once I (and the main character) got past the not-quite-incest aspect of it, it actually turned out to be a quality romance, as one would expect from Harris.

I liked that the mystery in this installment wasn’t built upon something that had happened in the past, before the series began. It wasn’t as if these two characters suddenly sprang to life at the beginning of series. They have a personal and professional lives before it and both were impacting the current events in the book. Just any author couldn’t pull this off, though. If it were executed incorrectly, the reader would be left feeling like they had missed something in a previous installment. But Harris is a master of world building and character development, so she was able to fill in the gaps in a natural and subtle way.

However, the “whodunit” was just too obvious. Before the halfway mark, I had already decided not only the “who” but also the “why”, therefore I quickly became bored with the plot of this installment. Grave Surprise was easily my least favorite book in the series.