My Take In Brief: I have a huge bone to pick with Ms. Harris on this one. And some smaller ones. The least successful book in the series from my point of view.
Word on the Web:
Dionne Galace, B- This review nails it, IMO:
I don’t know how to feel about this book because on one hand, I enjoyed it an awful lot. On the other, there were so many things about it that just really pissed me off. I’m a Sookie-Eric shipper, but I have also always liked Vampire Bill. What we find out about him in this book is so out of character and so out of left field that I was left to scratch my head, asking myself: how on earth did I miss that? It just felt like character assassination. Sure, Bill is secretive and a little bit shady sometimes, but how did he go from “perfect guy” to adulterer, then vile seducer of virgins for nefarious purposes?
Urban Fantasy, positive , makes another great point:
In Definitely Dead, we see Sookie getting a little harder than she used to be. In earlier books Sookie really started to lose the sense of isolation caused by her mental condition, and that process has continued through the series. But by getting close to people, she opened herself up to heartache made all the worse by her social awkwardness. Her troubles make her temper shorter and her tongue sharper, and to me that’s an interesting development.
AAR, Sandy, C+. I sympathize with this criticism, too:
Frankly, when an author publishes roughly one book a year in a beloved series, I don’t think it’s too much to expect for there to be some kind of major moves forward for the character in each entry. Though I’ve started to feel some twinges of ennui prior to this book, Definitely Dead feels decidedly like a placeholder in which nothing much happens.
Thifty Reader has a post with brief re-read reviews of all the books (also see her longer review of DD). An unusual opinion, she says this is the best of the series.
Wicked Melody’s Tavern, positive
Love Vampires, 5 stars
ScooperSpeaks, positive
HorrorScope, positive
Amazon.com, 4.5 stars after 163 reviews
Racy Romance Review (my apologies if I misspell names. No time to check!):
I listened to this on audio, and bought it in paper. I am so addicted to Johanna Parker’s audio — she IS Sookie — that I feel like I am missing something if I “just” read. As the audio began, Sookie was preparing to go to New Orleans to arrange for the disposition of her dead cousin Hadley’s things. Huh? I wondered if I had accidentally fast forwarded my iPod. Nope. Then I wondered if I had somehow missed the last chapter of the prior book. Nope.
As you likely already know, the missing link between Book 5 and Book 6 of the Southern Vampire Mysteries is a short story, “One Word Answer”, in the anthology Bite. I’m sorry to get vulgar, but you need to know how I felt about this and the only honest way to express it is to say it pissed me right the fuck off. How about a couple of lines somewhere in either book to tip the loyal reader off? Grrrrr.
Many readers complained about the first 90 or so pages, which really were little vignettes, snippets of daily life, and not plot propelling scenes. I agree to some extent with this complaint: when I finished the book and looked back, I could see it was “filler”. But I so love Sookie and her world, that even when nothing is really happening to advance the major themes, I am pretty content to hang out in Bon Temps.
The main problems I had with this book began in New Orleans. I felt nothing flowed well together. There was just too much going on — the vampire queen’s political troubles, the witches, the luckless fate of Jake Purefoy, the new boyfriend, the old boyfriends. It was just … too much … . It felt rushed and a lot of things were not very believable.
For example, Sookie and Quinn escape a dangerous situation at the vampire ball. They run and run and run. Then they stop, they talk. And they run and run and run BACK. It made no sense to me.
There were three unsatisfactory mysteries: who killed a someone in Sookie’s woods, where the vampire queen’s barcelet went, and who is trying to kill Sookie.
At the end, when Sookie finds out who has been after her (mystery 3), the “resolution” made absolutely no sense. Here is someone that has been trying to kidnap and torture her for three books, and she decides to “trust” them “on their word” not to hurt her anymore.
And neither the resolution of the mystery of the vampire queen’s bracelet (#1) nor the way Sookie figured out who killed the person in her woods (#2) felt natural or compelling to me. I am pretty sure it didn’t make sense to Harris either, because she has Sookie explaining these things point by point, after the fact (“and then, I called up all the gas stations, and after that ….) just like in a B movie. It felt like a cheap way to wrap up loose ends.
Sookie does something in DD several times, which is to think to herself why something that shouldn’t makes sense does, in a very rational and point by point way, responding to various imagined objections. When this happens in a first person narrative, I hear not the narrator’s voice, but the author’s.
SPOILERS BEGIN
SPOILERS COMING
SPOLIERS NOW!!
I also want to say something about Bill. First of all, a minor point: why did he think going to N.O. was going to prevent Sookie from finding out that he had been sent by Sophie Ann to Bon Temps? I have no idea. Yet another thing that made no sense to me. Bill is usually not stupid.
But the subject that everyone talks about is whether learning in DD that Bill originally went to Bon Temps with the intention of getting Sookie to work for the New Orleans vampire queen is inconsistent with what we know about his character. I can report that the scene in the hospital when Sookie found out moved me to tears, and I thought it was terrific. So, as a reader immersed in the story, it didn’t feel false to me at all. I wasn’t thrown out of the story asking “WTF?”. I believed it.
I actually think Bill’s abandoning Sookie for Lorena a few books back without explaining himself was more out of character than this. I still feel that that was not satisfactorily dealt with.
Here’s a little more about why this “twist” worked (well enough) for me: I have always felt that Bill was a bit indecisvie and weak. He does have an independent streak, but it’s more from selfishness than strength. Bill generally takes the path of least reisstance, so I have no trouble believing he would have done as Sophie Ann asked. He probably was intrigued by idea of returning to his own homestead as well, giving him double motivation to go.
We now know that Sookie has some fairie blood, and she’s a knockout in ordinary mortal terms, so I have no problem believing that once he met her, he would have been deeply attracted to her. We also know that Bill is the first vampire Sookie has met: she cannot read his mind. Rather than making her fear him, she finds it comforting. He’s hot for her, he’s good looking, and he’s kind. So it makes sense that she is attracted to him.
Given the assumption that he did quickly come to like her and love her, I don’t think it’s character assassination: we know vampires ultimately are loyal to themselves. Telling Sookie would be impossible for him, because it would mean betraying his queen.
Sure, it would be nice if there were clues to Bill’s original intentions in past books. The fact that there are none suggests strongly that Harris did indeed decide to insert this after the fact. So, this twist is not as organic as it might have been. But it also worked pretty well to generate some drama and an added layer of complexity in an old relationship.
One last point, about the fairie blood: I don’t mind this (ok, it is a bit of a stretch to think the vamps who slept with her and drank her blood did not detect it), but it seems to have no connection to her mindreading abilities. that’s what confused me.
I did really enjoy this book, but it is the first one that had me scratching my head several times. I can only cross my fingers that the shark has not been jumped in this series!
