This is well-paced, easy to read urban fantasy that provides plenty of chills. Harris works well with female characters, staying well away from the Anita Blake type and focusing instead on an ordinary woman struggling to deal with an extraordinary ability.

Harper has never stopped searching for her sister, and the plot thread relating to Cameron’s disappearance is always in the background, providing the motivation for Harper’s continuing work with the dead.

They’re the children of feckless, drug and drink-addicted parents who left the care of their youngest children, Mariella and Gracie, to Harper and her younger sister, Cameron, but Cameron’s disappearance brought the dysfunctional family to the attention of the authorities and ended up with the younger children being adopted by their aunt and uncle while Harper and Connelly went to live with Tolliver’s older brother, Mark. Harper works with her step-brother, Tolliver Lang. She doesn’t just find the bodies, she knows their names and usually what the cause of their death. As jobs go, hers is a pretty dangerous one as there are usually plenty of people with vested interests in making sure that certain bodies remain undiscovered, and occasionally, Harper turns up secrets of a different kind, not just the remains of murder victims. It becomes obvious fairly quickly that the people – particularly police departments – who call on Harper’s services, view her with suspicion, but despite that, there’s plenty of demand for what she does. She’s got a light touch with world-building, dropping in just enough information both to fend off confusion and pique interest. This ability to jump straight into a story is one of Harris’s strong points.

The first book hits the ground running, without wasting time on back story or exposition. But in this case, the people Harper finds are very definitely dead rather than missing. Meg Cabot did this in When Lightning Strikes, the first of her excellent 1-800-WHERE R U series for young adults, and Harris employs the same plot device to good effect here. Three more books followed and now they’ve been brought together in an omnibus edition.Ī lightning strike is a handy way to hand-wave why your protagonist has conveniently acquired a new – and usually supernatural – ability. But almost ten years ago, in Grave Sight, she introduced a new main character, Harper Connelly, a woman with the ability to find dead bodies. Charlaine Harris is probably best known for her Sookie Stackhouse series, brought to a television audience under the name of True Blood.

Harper connelly series in order