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Club Dead

Charlaine Harris

Published 2003       258 pages

Synopsis

Sookie Stackhouse is back in the third instalment of the southern vampire series.  This time things aren’t going too well for Sookie with her vampire boyfriend Bill.  He has been more interested in working on his computer than spending time with her recently.  He seems distracted when she is around and his feelings for her seem to have cooled.  He tells her that he is going away and asks her to secretly hide his computer and computer disks in her house while he is gone.

Things go from bad to worse when a man turns up at the bar where Sookie works and tries to kill her.  Sookie’s life is saved by Bubba, a vampire who had been sent to protect her.  He kills her assailant who turns out to be a werewolf from Mississippi.  Sookie finds out from Eric that Bill has been kidnapped by the Mississippi vampires.  The werewolves work for the Mississippi vampires and have been sent to capture her in an attempt to make Bill disclose the whereabouts of his computer to his captors.  She also finds out that Bill was planning to run away with another woman, a vampire that he had been lovers with many years ago.

Eric, Bill’s boss, needs to get Bill and his computer back before anyone realises that they are missing.  He arranges for Sookie to go to Jackson, Mississippi to see if she can find out where Bill is being kept prisoner using her telepathic abilities.  Sookie is devastated by Bill’s defection but she won’t leave him to be tortured and killed when there’s a chance he can be rescued.  Her adventures in Jackson take her to Club Dead, a nightclub where vampires and shape shifters hang out together. It’s the night of the full moon, so things are bound to be wild….

The Review

This is yet another great book from Charlaine Harris.  Sookie is in fine form, having more supernatural adventures and disposing of dead werewolves with aplomb. 

Alcide Herveaux - werewolf, building surveyor, and manly stud muffin is introduced as a new character in this book.  He helps fill in a lot of the blanks in Sookie’s knowledge of shape shifters and werewolves.  So in this book we find out more about the shape shifters and the werewolves.  Unlike the vampires the weres and shifters haven’t come out of the closet and announced their presence to humanity but they are well organised and have their own structured society.  It is explained that true werewolves can only be born, one child to two full blooded werewolf parents, otherwise the gene is not passed on.  If someone is bitten by a werewolf, they will turn into a wolfman but a wolfman can’t breed (and they don’t usually live too long after they change into a wolfman.)

Although Alcide is a prime candidate for becoming a new romantic interest for Sookie (he’s attractive, successful and alive) he comes with baggage.  The baggage being that he is a werewolf and has a psycho ex-girlfriend.  We shall have to see how their relationship pans out in the later books but personally I don’t warm to him as a romantic hero.  It wasn’t just that he was a werewolf (I’m more of a cat person myself) but he seemed weak willed which made him less attractive in my eyes.

The story is well plotted with twists and turns that are original and unexpected plus the mystery element of the story is first rate too.  The action in the story was fast paced and once again Charlaine Harris has written a book that I found hard to put down. 

In a nutshell, if you like supernatural fantasy, romances and mystery stories you are going to love this book.

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