The Harper Connelly Mysteries by Charlaine Harris
Every year, my country starts celebrating Christmas on September first. Don’t ask me why. I will deal with this by reading a supernatural mystery series. This week, I finished a series I started way back in the noughties. These novels, set mainly in the southern US, were written by Charlaine Harris. She is perhaps better known for The Sookie Stackhouse novels, which were the bases for the True Blood series on HBO.
When I said I started this series in the noughties (I should probably be saying aughts, for consistency, but noughties is the funnier word. Noughties, noughties, noughties), what I meant is that I read the first of the quartet, Grave Sight, in 2009. By then, I had picked up the Sookie Stackhouse novels (1–4?) and followed the first season of True Blood on HBO. There must have been a lull while waiting for books or in between seasons. While I had been intrigued by the heroine Harper and felt more simpatica towards her than with Sookie, the Sookie Stackhouse universe just had more going on — vampires, werewolves, fairies, and psychotropic blood for starters. But here I am more than a decade after picking up the rest of the series after finding the books at the local Big Bad Wolf.
Briefly, the first novel introduced Harper Connelly. She was struck by lightning at 15. After she was revived by her stepbrother Tolliver Lang, she had weird web-like marks on a noticeably wobbly right leg, headaches, and the uncanny ability to find dead bodies and determine their cause of death. Thereafter, Harper and Tolliver made their living traveling town to town locating corpses and/or determining how they died. Throughout the quartet, she insists that her weirdly specific ability is not psychic. Along the way, she deals with aggressions on both micro and macro scales — the name-calling is standard but some physical aggression as well. The first novel also established the duo’s sexually tense and somewhat co-dependent dynamic. Their troubling backstory is broadly hinted at but more details are given in books 2–4. All the books have since been collected in an omnibus, one of which I managed to borrow for a recap of the first novel.
Title: Grave Surprise (book 2)
Author: Charlaine Harris
Publisher: Gollancz-Orion Publishing Group
Released: 2007
Pages: 249 (paperback)
Harper and Tolliver travel to Memphis, Tennessee to do an exhibition at an old cemetery for an anthropology class at a private college. The professor handling the class had already decided that Harper was a fraud. He gets agitated when she surprises everyone when she finds the body of a missing girl, Tabitha Morgenstern, interred atop the known occupant of one grave. As in the first novel, Harper and Tolliver get sucked into sleuthing even as they keep saying that Harper only locates corpses and looks into their last moments to determine cause of death. (And speaking of the first novel, it does have a few Easter eggs about this novel’s dead girl, Tabitha Morgenstern.) As the events unfold, things look more and more like a set-up. To her credit, Charlene Harris throws a few suspects into the mix but she just as rapidly eliminates most of them. In the end, I was ready for the revelation of who the killer was but wasn’t quite satisfied with the killer’s motive.
This novel introduces Xylda and Manfred Bernardo. Manfred steals the show and is somewhat instrumental in how Harper forms an insight into her feelings.
Title: An Ice Cold Grave (book 3)
Author: Charlaine Harris
Publisher: Gollancz-Orion Publishing Group
Released: 2008
Pages: 249 (paperback)
The first two novels in the series each pertained to a missing girl who is presumed dead. Likewise, the big mystery in the series pertains to Harper’s sister Cameron, who disappeared shortly after Harper was struck by lightning. Maybe she was wary of the dead girl trope so Charlaine Harris switched gears here. Sort of. Instead of dead girls, she has Harper investigating missing boys who are presumed dead. Yes, multiple. As in serial.
Harper and Tolliver are asked by a new sheriff to investigate the disappearance of six boys. The former sheriff had considered them runaways and ruled out further investigations. By the end of the third chapter, Harper has already found the graves. But as in the previous novels, this does not mean that she can now cash her check and leave with Tolliver in tow. She’s hit instead with a shovel on page 40 and ends up in the hospital for her injuries. Xyla and Manfred Bernardo also show up. Xyla gets to show off one last time before she is admitted to the same hospital where Harper was treated. Manfred goes rogue and finds the killer. The problem? It’s only page 181 of 249.
Of the four novels in the series, I think this one would fare best as a standalone. Even the relationship plot point between Harper and Tolliver wouldn’t lose too much impact if you hadn’t had two novels worth of tension for context. (Yes, they do hook up. No, it’s not a spoiler because it’s on the back cover blurb of the 4th book. Yes, it is awkward. And Harris apparently thought to mark the occasion by naming her network of choice.)
Title: Grave Secret (book 4)
Author: Charlaine Harris
Publisher: Gollancz-Orion Publishing Group
Released: 2010
Pages: 306 (paperback)
As in the second novel, the last of the quartet begins with an exhibition. A bored Texarkana heiress wanted to be entertained and hired Harper and Tolliver to comment on her dead grandfather’s cause of death. However, it’s Harper’s incidental finding that the elderly man’s caregiver had died after giving birth that stirs a hornet’s nest. Soon after, Tolliver gets shot. As do a footballer-turned-detective and detective-turned-private eye. The reappearance of Matthew Lang (Tolliver’s father/Harper’s stepfather) and a sighting of Cameron further muddle the plot and cause both Harper and Tolliver to rehash painful memories.
Harper and Tolliver’s family get a lot of lines in this novel. Matthew and Mark Lang, Tolliver’s father and brother, show up. Aunt Iona and Uncle Hank appear as actual people, complete with hopes, dreams, and peeves. (Charlaine Harris never allows the reader to forget the ick of Harper/Tolliver by making every single character comment on it.) There’s a lot of exposition at the expense of plot progression in the first two-thirds of the novel, making the resolution feel rushed.
All of these isn’t to say that Harris did Harper Connelly dirty. Rather, the novelist was done with the character and wanted to move on? She did after all churn out the novels in rapid succession, pushing out nearly a novel a year. (I’ve also attributed some of the continuity problems to this — e.g., changes in eye color, age discrepancies, and which aunt belongs to side of the family.) And she did cover a lot of themes over the course of the quartet. The ones that filled me with horror were an educational system that evidently neglected to teach the use of Punnet squares, a broken health care system and the sexist assholes who flourish in it, and how easily people can slide from comfortable middle class to abject poverty. The drug-addled trailer park Brady Bunching was also difficult to read. To her credit, the depictions of foster care and adoption were refreshingly positive.
What’s my verdict? Can the novels be read as stand-alone? Yes. Can they be read out of sequence? Also yes. Is this Charlaine Harris’s best work? No.