ISBN: 0-425-20568-1 Order from: Amazon.com Barnes & Noble.com
Attractive main characters and skillfully portrayed small-town environment form the foundation for the bleak tone and conventional mystery plot with just a smidgen of the supernatural.
Reviewed by David on November 20, 2005
Genre: Fantasy (ESP)
Synopsis: Harper Connelly sees dead people. She doesn't converse with them, can't find their secrets. She just know where they are, and knows how they died.
Most who meet her think she's a charlatan. Those who see her at work consider her a freak, maybe a witch. This does not lend itself to warm human relationships, but this skill of hers is the only way Harper knows to make her living. Going from town to town with her brother Tolliver, she discovers the bodies of victims of murder and accident, and occasionally a suicide.
A wealthy widow in the town of Sarne hired Harper to find the body of Teenie, a teenager missing and presumed dead. Harper's skill is reliable, but her answers just create more questions—and almost nobody in town wants them asked.
Full Review: Harper, and her brother Tolliver create a likable pair of visitors to uncover painful mysteries. While one would expect their presense to stir controversy and resentment—this is, after all, a murder mystery, the entire town here seems antogonistic. With almost no sympathetic characters, and the finely drawn vulnerability of Harper, this results in a bleak, harried experience for the first-person protagonist.
The lack of pleasure and humor in the narrative resembles the earlier Lyly Bard books Shakespeare's Champion. The conventional nature of the mystery and generally minor contribution of the supernatural skill that Harper possesses does little to alleviate the difficult atmosphere of the book. While generally satisfying and very skillfully written, one hopes that future sequels acquire more fun, for the engaging protagonist, as well as for the reader.
Copyright: 2005
Overall: 6; Plot: 5.5; Characters: 6; Style: 6.5; World-building: 6; Originality: 6;
Berkley Publishing Group (Berkley Prime Crime), October 2005, Cloth, 263 pages
ISBN: 0-425-20568-1 Order from: Amazon.com Barnes & Noble.com