Harper Connelly had a lucky escape when she was hit by lightning: she didn't die. But sometimes she wishes she had died, because the lightning strike left her with an unusual talent: she can find dead people - and that's not always comfortable. Everyone wants to know how she does it: it's a little like hearing a bee droning inside her head, or maybe the pop of a Geiger counter, a persistent, irregular noise that increases in strength as she gets closer. It's almost electric: a buzzing all through her body, and the fresher the corpse, the more intense the buzz. Harper and her brother Tolliver make their living from finding the dead, for desperate parents, worried friends . . . and police departments who have nowhere else to look. They may not believe in her abilities, but sometimes the proof is just too much for even the most sceptical of police chiefs to deny. But it's not always easy for someone like Harper, for the dead *want* to be found - and too often, finding the body doesn't bring closure; it opens a whole new can of worms.
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This is the first Charlaine Harris book I've read so didn't know what to expect. Story-wise it's a good mystery and I didn't guess the ending until...well, the end. I just never really felt connected to the characters though. Harper is really hard to figure out, one minute she's streetsmart and mouthy, the next she's a wreck and can't function because she's like a little-girl-lost. I'm not sure if this will be explained a little more in the next books but so far she's not that likeable. Her brother Tolliver is a bit of a mystery too and I'm still not sure what makes him tick.
It's a good book but I'm hoping it will become a bit more fleshed out in the rest of the series. I was hoping for more of her special ability of being able to 'speak' to the departed and the story did revolve around this, but there wasn't very much of that side of things this time.
It held my interest to find out where things were headed all the way through so I'd recommend it, but it's a fairly quick read and if I'm honest not a lot happened in this one.
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