Dead Until Dark - Charlaine Harris

After much recommendation from fellow bloggers I decided to give the Sookie Stackhouse, Southern vampire series a go. I managed to buy a 7 book box-set off Amazon for half the price it would have cost me in an Australian bookstore and that was including postage! What a bargain!

Dead Until Dark is book number one in this series. It introduces Sookie Stackhouse, a waitress who has the gift of being able to read minds, and her new love interest, a vampire named Bill Compton. They live in a small town called Bon Temps, Louisiana and there have been some violent murders since Bill came to town.. can Sookie use her mind reading ability to find the killer before he kills his next victim? Can she prove her brother and bill are both innocent of these crimes and more importantly, can you really have a relationship with a vampire

Sookie Stackhouse is a small-time cocktail waitress in small-town Louisiana. She’s quiet, keeps to herself, and doesn’t ge out much. Not because she’s not pretty. She is. It’s just that, well, Sookie has this sort of “disability”. She can read minds. And that doesn’t make her too datable. And then along comes Bill. He’s tall, dark, handsome – and Sookie can’t hear a word he’s thinking. He’s exactly the type of guy she’s been waiting for all her life…

But Bill has a disability of his own: He’s a vampire with a bad reputation. He hangs with a seriously creepy crowd, all suspected of – big surprise – murder. And when one of Sookie’s coworkers is killed, she fears she’s next…

I enjoyed this book. It was fun, easy to read and the main characters were likeable and interesting. It was a good introduction to the series, which looks like it is going to be a lot of fun to read. I was a bit surprised at first at the amount of sex in the first half of this book… I felt like I was reading vampire erotica! But the mystery plot in this book was interesting enough to keep my attention, as was Sookie’s mind reading ability. I am looking forward to seeing how the next book develops the characters and story.

The TV series, True Blood is also based on these books. One of the many series I have been meaning to watch. Maybe now i’ve read one of the books i will finally get around to it.. or maybe I will just finish reading the books first..

Rating 3.5/ 5