From the back cover:
It’s not every day that you come across a naked man on the side of the road. That’s why cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse doesn’t just drive on by. Turns out the poor thing hasn’t a clue who he is, but Sookie does. It’s Eric the vampire—but now he’s a kinder, gentler Eric. And a scared Eric, because whoever took his memory now wants his life. Sookie’s investigation into who and why leads straight into a dangerous battle among witches, vampires, and werewolves. But a greater danger could be to Sookie’s heart—because this version of Eric is very difficult to resist…
Review:
I think I’d been lulled into a false sense of “hey, this series isn’t that smutty” by the previous book, Club Dead, in which Sookie’s vampire beau Bill is missing and in which the closest thing to a sex scene is Eric’s… enthusiasm when Sookie drinks his blood at one point. But now that Sookie and Bill are good and broken up (yay!), she is free to pursue other opportunities, which manifest in the form of an amnesic Eric who has been cursed by a witch for spurning her advances as well as for owning a profitable nightclub she’d like to take over. He ends up hiding at Sookie’s place while he’s not himself and though she resists his charms for a while, she eventually goes “to hell with thinking” and then we get way too much detail about what they get up to together.
Anyways, aside from the “Sookie hooks up with Eric” plot, there are two main things going on: the big bad coven of witches is attempting to take over various supernaturally owned businesses and eventually the vampires and werewolves ally together to take them out. Sookie gets involved in the attack and it’s not a pleasant experience. Secondly, Sookie’s brother has been abducted and she spends most of the book thinking that his disappearance is somehow connected to the witches. Of the two, I preferred the Jason storyline, as it has far greater potential for interesting complications down the road. The witches were rather dull, really.
I seem to like the endings of these books more than what comes before, and that’s no exception here. I like where Sookie and Eric are at the end of the volume, I like Bill’s menacing return (I actually went “ohhhhh shit”), and I like the ultimate fate of Debbie Pelt. This last possibly frees Sookie to hook up with Alcide the hunky werewolf next, and while part of me cringes at the idea of this series becoming something akin to the works of Laurell K. Hamilton, the other part appreciates that Harris doesn’t keep her heroine tied down with notions of true love.
And really, that’s about all I have to say about Dead to the World. It was fluffy and pleasantly diverting. I’ll keep reading more. I’ll keep going “ooh” at certain things and “ew” at others. I still haven’t summoned the fortitude to give the TV adaptation another shot, but that might be only a matter of time.
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