To all of you who don’t know the Sookie Stackhouse Series by Charlaine Harris, well, it’s basically a book series about a waitress from Bon Temps (a fictional town in Louisiana). Sookie is a special woman, because she can hear people’s thoughts. (And she has no idea why) The series starts when the vampires make their existence official to the human world. Soon, Sookie gets involved with her neighbour Bill, who is a vampire…

If you like paranormal romance, this is the series for you. It is full of vampires, werewolves, shifters and many more. There’s lots of mysterious things happening in Louisiana. And I love the Southern feeling you get while reading.

Reading order:

1. Dead Until Dark
2. Living Dead in Dallas
3. Club Dead
4. Dead to the World
5. Dead as a Doornail
6. Definitely Dead
7. All Together Dead
8. From Dead to Worse
9. Dead and Gone
10. Dead in the Family
11. Dead Reckoning
12. Deadlocked
13. Dead Ever After

Today I’d like to talk about Deadlocked which is the 12th instalment in the series.

Summary quoted from Penguin Group USA¹:

It’s vampire politics as usual around the town of Bon Temps, but never before have they hit so close to Sookie’s heart…

Growing up with telepathic abilities, Sookie Stackhouse realized early on there were things she’d rather not know. And now that she’s an adult, she also realizes that some things she knows about, she’d rather not see—like Eric Northman feeding off another woman. A younger one.

There’s a thing or two she’d like to say about that, but she has to keep quiet—Felipe de Castro, the Vampire King of Louisiana (and Arkansas and Nevada), is in town. It’s the worst possible time for a human body to show up in Eric’s front yard—especially the body of the woman whose blood he just drank.

Now, it’s up to Sookie and Bill, the official Area Five investigator, to solve the murder. Sookie thinks that, at least this time, the dead girl’s fate has nothing to do with her. But she is wrong. She has an enemy, one far more devious than she would ever suspect, who’s set out to make Sookie’s world come crashing down.

My Thoughts:

Deadlocked was not what I was hoping for. It started all right but it did never catch my full attention. Previously, I never wanted to stop reading a Sookie Stackhouse book, this time, it was always hard to pick it up again. I wasn’t really interested in finding out who killed the girl. I also wasn’t interested in reading more about what Sookie was doing on a day to day basis (shopping, cooking, checking her e-mails, not checking her e-mails,…). I wanted to read more about Eric. But there wasn’t much Eric in the book. There were hardly any relationships in the book. And it didn’t seem like any of the characters cared. It wasn’t like reading a book written in first person narration. I didn’t really feel much of a connection this time.

It seems to me like Charlaine Harris has used this book solely to get rid of a few characters and side plots, to prepare everything for the last book in the series. Unfortunately, she forgot that her readers appreciate a good story and some emotion… I was really looking forward to Deadlocked but unfortunately, it disappointed me.

¹http://www.us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9781937007447,00.html