Bite (Mass Market Paperback)

From Publishers Weekly
Those looking to take a brief taster’s tour through five sexually charged paranormal worlds may enjoy the stories and novellas served up in this anthology, but readers with an appetite for something a little more meaty likely won’t be sated. Although Hamilton’s name dominates the cover, her contribution is a meager 30 pages, which amounts to little more than a teaser for her next Anita Blake novel. Harris’s offering is similarly slim and static, though it shows off the cleverness of Sookie Stackhouse, the psychic heroine of her Southern Vampire series (Dead to the World, etc.). By far, the collection’s best offerings are Knight’s “Galahad” and Taylor’s “Blood Lust.” In the former, a fledgling Majae (i.e., witch) teams up with the famed knight Sir Galahad, who’s really a benevolent vampire, to destroy a nest of deadly cultist vampires. And in the latter, Taylor imagines a much more traditional world, wherein vampires can’t touch anything sacrosanct an (more…)

Grave Sight (Harper Connelly Mysteries, Book 1)

From Publishers Weekly
Ever since Harper Connelly survived a zap from a lightning bolt, she’s been able to find dead people, a skill that makes the protagonist in the first installment of Harris’s new series a tad more bizarre than the mind-reading heroine of the author’s Sookie Stackhouse books (Dead as a Doornail, etc.). Harper travels to the Ozark town of Sarne, Ark., to find a missing teenage girl’s body, accompanied by her stepbrother, Tolliver, who acts as her manager and bodyguard and with whom she shares a thinly disguised physical attraction that they manage to keep at bay by engaging in casual sex with various partners. Finding the body takes no time at all, but leaving town afterward isn’t so easy. When Harper’s life is threatened and Tolliver ends up in jail on trumped-up charges, it quickly becomes apparent that something sinister is going on in Sarne. Harris delivers a knuckle-gnawing tale populated with well-developed, albeit edgy characters. A nifty puzzle (more…)