Dead and Gone

I picked up Dead and Gone because From Dead to Worse left Sookie single, blood tied to Eric, and newly aware she carries fairy blood, and I needed to see what Harris would do with all that. She does a lot. Maybe too much. Charlaine Harris first published Dead and Gone May 5, 2009 with Ace Books in the US, book nine in the Sookie Stackhouse series. The standard Ace mass market runs 320 pages with ISBN 9780441018512. I read it over a long weekend, mostly on the couch, and I had to put it down twice during the last third because it gets rough.

Sookie Stackhouse is still our narrator. Telepathic waitress at Merlotte's in Bon Temps, Louisiana. Around humans she hears everything, which leaves her with headaches and a strong filter. Around vampires she gets quiet, which is why they like her and use her. By book nine she has buried friends, survived a hotel bombing at a vampire summit, learned her great grandfather is a fairy prince named Niall Brigant, broken a friend's hand over family honor in Hot Shot, and ended things with Quinn the weretiger. She is not naive anymore. She is watchful. Tired, kind, funny about tips and clothes, blunt about sex, still praying in her head when she is scared.

This book has two big public shocks and one private war. The public one you hear about first. The Weres and shifters decide to follow the vampires and tell the world they exist.

The night Sam changes in front of everyone

Sam Merlotte, Sookie's boss, shifter who favors collie, has hidden all his life. In Bon Temps most people knew about vampires by now. They knew nothing about Weres. Sam decides to tell them. He picks an evening at Merlotte's. Tray Dawson, big Were bodyguard who dates Amelia, stands with him. Sam shifts in front of neighbors. Tray shifts too. Fur in a bar that smells of beer and fries.

Harris handles the reveal with small town truth. Most people in Bon Temps take it fairly well, after the first gasp. Business dips at Merlotte's for a bit, then comes back. People are curious, then they are hungry, then they order. Sam's mother, who is also a shifter, gets shot by Sam's stepfather in the fallout, which pulls Sam out of town to help her. His siblings who did not know the family secret struggle. Sam leaves Sookie in charge of the bar. She learns fast that running a place is different from working it. Orders, vendors, schedules, cash, smiles when you are scared.

Not everyone adjusts. Arlene, fellow waitress, longtime coworker, takes it badly. Arlene has been dating a man tied to the Fellowship of the Sun, the anti vampire church that hates Sookie from earlier books. Arlene quits in a fury. The friendship cracks in a way that feels real and ugly. People you worked beside for years can turn when fear and a new boyfriend push them. Sookie misses who Arlene was. She does not miss who Arlene is becoming.

The FBI shows up too. Agents Tom Lattesta and Sara Weiss want to talk about Rhodes, about how Sookie found people after the pyramid hotel collapsed. Sookie tries to explain listening without explaining too much. Feds in Bon Temps always mean paperwork and trouble. This visit gets interrupted by murder, which tells you what kind of month it is.

My favorite small beat here is Sookie running the bar. Counting bottles. Covering shifts. Dealing with customers who stare at the spot where Sam changed. She is good at it because she listens. She hears worry under jokes. She comps fries when it helps. Those work scenes keep the book human when the myth stuff gets huge, and Harris writes them like someone who has actually closed a bar at night.

A marriage Sookie did not agree to

Vampire politics press in fast. Felipe de Castro, King of Nevada who now holds Louisiana too after Sophie-Anne's fall, is consolidating. His representative Victor Madden wants Eric, Bill, and Pam dead and wants the state tidy for business. Eric Northman, the only Louisiana sheriff left alive after the takeover, sits in a weak spot. He fears Felipe will take Sookie to Vegas and use her as a human lie detector in deals.

So Eric does something clever and wrong. He tricks Sookie into a vampire marriage. He sends her a black velvet bundle with directions to meet him at Fangtasia. She follows the ritual without knowing the rules. In front of Victor, they are pledged. By vampire custom they are married. Human law says nothing. Vampire law says a lot. Sookie is furious when she understands. She tells Eric so. He does not apologize enough.

I had mixed feelings reading this. On paper it protects her. A married woman in vampire eyes cannot be easily claimed by a king. In practice it steals choice from a woman who has had choices stolen before. Harris lets Sookie stay angry. She does not swoon and forgive in two pages. She sleeps in the same bed for safety and keeps her emotional distance. That tension drives much of the book.

Eric also opens up here in a way he never has. Upset about Crystal's death, Sookie goes to him and he talks about his human life. A wife and children long gone. How he was turned. How his maker used him badly after. What the witch's curse in book four really meant, that he would be close to his heart's desire without knowing it. It is a long quiet scene, mostly talking, and it is my favorite in the series so far. No fights. Just a very old man telling a young woman what shaped him, and her listening without trying to fix it. It made Eric easier to love and harder to trust, both at once. I wish Harris had let that scene breathe even longer instead of rushing to the next attack.

Bill Compton helps more than he harms here, which I noted with pleasure. He guards, he heals, he shows up when Sookie is taken. After books of his lies and stiff pride, his devotion in this one feels earned. He and Eric even work together when it counts, which would have been unthinkable in book two.

Crystal in the parking lot

Then the murder. Jason's pregnant werepanther wife Crystal is found mutilated and crucified in the Merlotte's parking lot. It looks like a hate crime after the reveal. Bon Temps freezes. Jason shatters. Sookie, who never liked Crystal much, still feels sick. No one deserves that. Pregnant, left like a warning.

Police ask questions. Andy Bellefleur and the FBI circle. Sookie agrees it could be hate, but she wonders if it was personal too. Crystal was unfaithful, sharp tongued, tangled with many people. Sookie says so plainly, which some readers will dislike. I thought it was honest. You can grieve a brutal death and still admit the victim was difficult. Harris does not sanctify Crystal to make the crime worse. The crime is already worst.

Jason's grief turns messy. He admits he hit Crystal once during a fight about her cheating, thought she was dead, left her in his truck for a moment, and when he came back her body was gone. He does not know how she ended up at Merlotte's. That confession makes him look bad and human. Sookie believes he did not crucify her, but she files away that he could hit that hard. Family love with eyes open. That is a hard note and Harris plays it without flinching.

Sookie investigates in her usual way. Not with a badge. With ears. She stands near people, listens to thoughts, catches lies. She talks to Calvin Norris in Hot Shot, to Weres, to bar customers. She learns fear is spreading. Parents keep kids home. Regulars drink faster. Someone paints words. Someone else breaks a window. Tolerance, it turns out, is thin when tested at night.

Arlene's kitchen

The Arlene thread scared me more than the fairy war for a stretch. Arlene invites Sookie to her home, sudden warmth after cold weeks. Sookie is suspicious because the change is too fast. She parks, slips into the woods, listens toward the trailer. Inside, Fellowship men wait. They plan to do to Sookie what was done to Crystal. Crucify her as an example. Arlene will lead her in.

Sookie calls the authorities instead of walking in. Good. She confronts Arlene from outside cover. What follows is loud. Shots. One Fellowship man killed. An FBI agent wounded. Arlene arrested with the survivor. Sookie shakes for hours after. Betrayal by a coworker you covered shifts for hits different from a vampire plot. Vampires are supposed to be dangerous. Arlene made you tea.

Harris makes an important distinction here. The Fellowship men did not kill Crystal. They planned a copycat. That matters. It means two separate evils are working Bon Temps at once. Hate using a murder as a template, and something older using murder for fun. Sookie realizes this with dread. Solving Arlene does not solve Crystal. I liked that structural choice even as it tired me. It stops the book from becoming a simple hate crime story and forces Sookie to look deeper.

Arlene's fall deserves a note on criticism. Some readers will find her turn too fast. I did not. Harris seeded it for books. Arlene's fear of vampires, her new boyfriend, her jealousy of Sookie, her money stress. Fear plus love plus money is a fast road. What I did find thin was the Fellowship men themselves. They blur into beards and slogans. One clear face among them would have made the trap scene sharper.

After the arrest, Sookie does not gloat. She goes home, locks doors, checks windows, jumps at sounds. She keeps saying she is fine. She is not fine. That feels true.

Fairies who kill kin

The deeper evil is fairy. Niall, Sookie's fairy great grandfather and a prince among his people, is at war. His kinsman Breandan, son of Niall's dead older brother, wants Faery closed and human blood cleaned out. With him are Lochlan and Neave, two fairies who are cruel in a way that made my stomach turn. They believe mixing with humans weakens the fairy people. So they kill humans with part fairy blood. They killed Sookie's parents years ago by causing the flood that drowned them. Her father carried fairy blood. They crucified Crystal for sport. They want Sookie because her blood offends them and because hurting her hurts Niall.

Claude and Claudine, the fairy twins tied to Sookie, try to explain the sides. Niall claims kinship to the sky, Breandan's line to the sea, old families with old pride. I will admit the politics confused me. Names pile up. Who is prince, who is cousin, who fathered whom. Harris gives enough to follow the hate if not the heraldry. Lochlan and Neave hate part humans. Breandan wants separation. Niall wants connection, at least to Sookie and Jason. Everyone else is a pawn.

Sookie gets taken outside her own house. Wakes in fairy hands. What follows is torture, hours of it, with Tray Dawson taken too. Tray, Amelia's boyfriend and Sookie's guard, suffers badly trying to protect her. A woman compels him to drink vampire blood in the woods earlier and he is violently ill, which shows how exposed they all are. In captivity Sookie is cut and broken while Lochlan and Neave try to force Niall to surrender. Bill and Niall find them and kill the pair, but Sookie is left badly wounded in body and head. Eric gives her blood, but he cannot give enough to heal her fully because he needs strength for the fight ahead and her injuries are severe.

I put the book down here. Not because it is poorly written. Because it is vivid and personal in first person. Sookie narrates pain plainly, without poetry. That plainness makes it worse. Harris does not use suffering for thrill. She shows cost. Still, readers who find torture hard to read should know it is long and detailed. I think the book earns it by not forgetting it. Sookie does not bounce back. She limps, cries, flinches, needs help to stand. Later books will carry it too.

The final fight happens at the hospital for supernaturals, with Dr. Ludwig in charge. Breandan comes to finish things. Claudine, pregnant and brave, dies. Tray dies. Clancy, the vampire bartender, dies. Eric and Bill kill Breandan together. Sookie lives because others bled for her. Niall then decides to do the very thing Breandan wanted, though for a different reason. He seals Faery off to protect humans from fairies and fairies from each other. He says goodbye to Sookie and Jason. His last words to Sookie about vampires land softly. He tells her one of them loves her and is not a bad man, then leaves before she can ask which one.

Two pregnant women die in this book, Crystal at the start and Claudine at the end, both tied to Sookie by law or blood. That pattern troubled me. Harris may mean it as a sign of how vulnerable creation is when old powers fight. On the page it feels heavy and bleak. Claudine's death hurt most. She saved Sookie so often, vain and kind and shining, and to lose her while she carries a child feels cruel even for war. I missed her at once. Tray's death hurt differently. A steady good man, gone in a war he did not start.

What I keep arguing with myself about

This is one of the strongest and hardest Sookie books. Strong because the threads connect. The reveal leads to backlash. Backlash masks a real murder. Murder opens into fairy hate. Fairy hate explains Sookie's parents. Everything touches. Harris juggles vampires, Weres, Feds, Fellowship, and fairies without dropping them, which is a feat. The Eric confession scene alone makes it worth reading. Bill's steady care, Sam trusting Sookie with his bar, Amelia waiting at home with worry, Jason broken and unlikable and still her brother. All of that lives.

Hard because it piles grief. Quinn gone in book eight, Crystal and Claudine and Tray gone here, Arlene lost to hate, Faery closed, Sookie tortured and married without full consent. Sookie ends alive but marked. Readers who love cozy mystery will struggle. This is not cozy. This is war with bar shifts between battles.

My fair criticisms stand beside the praise. The middle sags under names. Fairy genealogy needs a chart. Victor Madden as a villain is more memo than menace. The vampire marriage trick still bothers me on consent grounds, even if it saves Sookie's life in plot terms. Eric keeping that secret while asking for trust undercuts the lovely confession. I wanted Sookie to name that more sharply. She does name it, but then survival pushes it aside. I understand why. I still wanted a longer reckoning.

The torture length is my other complaint, not for being graphic but for crowding out grief for Crystal. Crystal's death starts the book and then fairy pain overtakes it. A woman crucified in a parking lot deserves more mourning from the town. Harris gives Jason mourning, Sookie unease, but the plot rushes past. I felt that rush as a flaw, not as pace. Slower would have honored the dead more.

What works best is Sookie's voice under pressure. She notices food when she cannot eat. She worries about the bar till while bleeding. She prays, apologizes for bothering God, then asks again. She tells Eric she is mad while holding his hand. She tells Bill thank you and means it. She tells Jason she loves him even when she does not like what he did. That mix of practical and tender carries pages that could have collapsed under myth.

If you read in order, you need this book. It closes the fairy door for a while, ends the Crystal question, breaks Arlene away for good, binds Sookie to Eric in vampire eyes, and leaves Sam's family frayed. It also sets up Dead in the Family, where Sookie will live with that marriage and those scars. Go in knowing it is darker than books one through seven. Keep water near. Take breaks. I did, and I am glad I finished. Sookie sitting up in a hospital bed, alive because people who love her refused to leave, stayed with me longer than the battles. She hears too much, survives too much, and still chooses to care for a bar, a brother, and a scared boy cousin we met in the last book. That choice is the series in one image.