About.com Rating

• Dead Ever After by Charlaine Harris was published in May 2013
• Publisher: Ace
• 352 pages

With Dead Ever After, Charlaine Harris brings her Southern vampire fantasy series, which started with Dead Until Dark and inspired the hit HBO series True Blood, to its end. Though I consider myself a fan, I can say without hesitation that it was time. The plots were becoming convoluted, the cast of characters was growing too large, and as a reader I could sense that Harris had grown weary of the series even before I read the Wall Street Journal article that said as much.

Not all fans feel this way, however. According to the article, many are in an uproar over the end of the Sookie era. One person emailed the author to say she’d kill herself if Sookie didn’t end up with Eric, and Harris has received several death threats on account of the ending of Dead Ever After when it was leaked before publication. Many others cancelled their pre-orders because they were so upset by the leaked ending. No wonder Harris wants the end to come!

Dead Ever After picks up immediately after the previous installment, Deadlocked. It goes without saying that you’ll want to have read all the previous Stackhouse books before you read the final one, or you’ll be lost. Even if you have read all of them, you still might be lost! There are so many characters, and types of characters - vampires, of course, and also were-people, shapeshifters, demons, devils, sprites, faeries, maenads, elves, witches, and others - populating several plot lines that it’s easy to lose track of what’s going on.

In Dead Ever After, it feels as if Harris wanted to bring back a lot of the characters for a final appearance, and fortunately for all of us, she manages to pull this off without it seeming too contrived. In fact, Dead Ever After was better written and executed than some of the other more recent installments, but it might be that I think that because Dead Reckoning lowered my expectations.

It’s difficult to give a synopsis of a mystery without including spoilers. In Dead Ever After, there are several mysterious bad guys out to harm Sookie, the telepathic twenty-something barmaid. Sookie is framed for the murder of a former friend and so sets out to solve the crime herself, with a little help from her supernatural friends, of course. Meanwhile, her relationship with vampire boyfriend Eric has turned cold and something strange is going on with her good friend and shapeshifter boss, Sam. Harris ties up plot lines tidily, though she plans to release a coda later this year that reveals further the fates of all the characters. Fans won’t want to miss that!

The Sookie Stackhouse series has been an enormous success and it’s easy to see why -- a mostly likeable protagonist, supporting characters you love to love, others you love to hate, romance, suspense, mystery, and twisty endings. Between the romance and mystery, most of the novels are truly page-turners. The series did get a bit confusing at times and a little stale as it neared the end, but on the whole, it’s still a fun and satisfying escape to a world not your own. This is as true of the series as of Dead Ever After. If you have not read any of the books, pick up the first one and add it to your beach bag this summer. If you get hooked, you will have twelve more installments to keep you entertained and you won't have to wait a year between each book, as early fans did!

Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.