Book Review: Midnight Crossroad

Author: Charlaine Harris
ISBN: 978-0-575-09285-3
RRP: $29.99

Midnight Crossroad is the brand new offering from the bestselling Charlaine Harris. Finally she’s left Bon Temps and Sookie Stackhouse behind, and not before time according to many of her fans (me included). This is a brand new trilogy in a brand new town but it brings together characters from previous series. There’s Manfred from the Harper Connelly series which I have read and the reviews can be found here at Beauty and Lace, there’s also Bobo Winthrop from the Shakespeare books. Apparently the Midnight, Texas series is to play host to characters from all Harris’s previous books so I look forward to seeing who will pop in from the Stackhouse series.

Harris has stuck with the supernatural and added a definite sense of mystery in this desolate and almost deserted small town. It looks pretty average as you drive through but once you stay a while you see there is much more to the town and its handful of permanent residents than meets the eye. Each and every one of them has their secrets and some of them won’t be discovered until subsequent books.

The Stackhouse books started strong and lost their way long before the end of the series, here’s hoping that being a trilogy Midnight holds its own and remains strong. The Harper Connelly series was four books and I quite enjoyed all of them.

Manfred Bernardo is a phone and internet psychic who moves into Midnight for a private place to focus on his work. He is very much the new kid in town but it doesn’t take long for the locals to welcome him as one of their own. All of these characters are a little quirky and their deserted little town is the perfect place for them to hideaway from whatever it is they ran from. Early on we discover what it is that sets some of these characters apart from your average mere mortal but others I think we will have to wait and see.

Midnight is a single traffic light town, positioned at the crossing of Witch Light Road and Davy Road. There are boarded up windows aplenty and few permanent residents. Yet there is a pawnshop which seems to do enough business, a gas station, the diner which is the main meeting place for residents and where outsiders stop to eat though not often to linger and a combination antique store and nail salon owned by gay couple Joe and Chuy. I am a little perplexed how an antique store and nail salon can stay in business in such a small and deserted town that doesn’t seem to welcome visitors but perhaps that question will be answered in time.

Midnight Crossroad had quite a slow start, Harris bogs down the story with excessive scene setting and detailed descriptions which I find quite tedious. It slowed the pace  quite dramatically in the beginning and took a while to gain momentum. At times it got quite repetitive, forever reinforcing that Midnight residents all have secrets and they like to keep them to themselves so personal questions are to be kept to a minimum and if you don’t want to answers questions about yourself then don’t ask questions of others.

Having said that, once we got into the story I quite liked the characters though for some reason I had great difficulty getting Manfred’s age stuck in my head. I’m not sure whether it was his name or his profession but I kept picturing him as markedly older than he was, possibly because the Harper Connelly books were so long ago and I had lost my image of him.

Fans of Sookie Stackhouse will enjoy Midnight and its unusual inhabitants, I think I may have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t become so disillusioned by the end of the Stackhouse series. Harris has tried to pack every sort of outcast she could think of into one small deserted town much like she ended up doing in the Stackhouse series though here they are not of a supernatural or mythical nature (should I add YET. It is only book one and you never know who is going to arrive later on. I think we will end up seeing the telepathic bell boy before the final pages of this series… that’s my prediction.)

I am not jumping up and down with excitement and itching to get my hands on the second installment but I am definitely interested to see what else Midnight, Texas has to offer. Bobo Winthrop was new to me as I haven’t read the Shakespeare books and Manfred is only a vague recollection but that really doesn’t matter. You can come into this series knowing only the Stackhouse series, or be completely new to Charlaine Harris and you won’t suffer any gaps in knowledge. An interesting read with an element of mystery to keep you involved, and a few unpredictable twists which caught me by surprise.

Michelle

I devour books, vampires and supernatural creatures are my genre of choice but over the past couple of years, I have broadened my horizons considerably. In a nutshell – I love to write! I love interacting with a diverse range of artists to bring you interviews. Perhaps we were perfect before – I LOVE WORDS!