Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I was hugely disappointed in this new book. It is the first of the series, with Manfred, the psychic friend of Harper Connelly as the star carryover from previous books. (Though, to be fair, Lily Bard from the Shakespeare books gets a mention too.) I so looked forward to this. I absolutely have loved every one of Charlaine Harris's books--I'm pretty sure I've read all her published novels, even the very early ones. And the Harper Connelly series (GRAVE SIGHT, etc.) is my absolute favorite. I liked Manfred in that series, the young man who worked with and looked after his grandmother. Both made a living as psychics, with Manfred having more actual talent than his grandmother, but both having actual flashes of psychic skills. But...my disappointment level is huge with this opening book of the new Midnight Texas series. First, the writing is very flat. This is a little town in West Texas out in the middle of nowhere, with maybe a couple hundred total residents, most of whom live in outlying ranches. The people living in the town are a group of a dozen or so. Of this cadre of characters, all of them appear to have odd back stories. One is a vampire. The businesses these people run appear to have no likelihood of ever drawing a single customer--who would go there to buy anything???--yet they all scratch out an acceptable living. Harris does so many character POV switches that we never really get to know any of the characters very well. She doesn't head-hop--the POV switches are clearly done. But everything is very shallow and...well...flat. Even worse. This is a mystery series, right? Well, in my Kindle edition, I was 80% of the way through the book before a dead body appeared! NOTHING HAPPENS in this story. There's no real conflict. There's no real story problem that drives the story from start to end. WORST OF ALL: No one has any real, knowable motivation for anything except the most superficial kind (It's the end of the worst of the summer heat, so let's do a community picnic to celebrate). In particular, why are all these people in this nowhere place? Who knows??? Okay, I can accept the vampire's motivation for staying there--he's been there 100+ years. Maybe he's attached to home ground. But nearly everyone else--most especially the "lead" characters Fiji and Manfred (the ones whose POV we're in most often)--have ZERO apparent motivation for moving to or staying in this nowhere place of Midnight, Texas. We never do learn why Manfred (last seen in the Harper Connelly books somewhere in NC or Tennessee...someplace like that) has chosen Midnight as his new place to be. There's not even a hint of how he even found it on the map, much less why he moved there. I'll grant that the motivation of one of the characters for living there is key to solving the question of who did in the dead body, but still... And, given that this is a mystery...nothing whatsoever surprised me in this story. Not the murderer. Not the "big reveal secret" at the end (no, I won't tell you what it is. You'll probably figure it out way early like I did anyway.) There is no mystery here. So...while the place has some level of intrigue (there is that vamp, and, apparently, other less-than-normal characters. And Fiji, of course, is a working witch), the characters themselves do not. Where is Sookie's quirky humor and desperate desire to be normal? (No one in Midnight appears to have a sense of humor.) Where is Harper Connelly's drive to find her missing sister? No one has any push to accomplish anything. There is no story problem driving the story. There is virtually no conflict anywhere in the book, except a minimal amount at the end. There is no real mystery to anything. The POV switches seem designed to prevent the reader from getting close to the characters and provide a lazy way to "tell" readers what's going on rather than "showing" them. This is flat, simplistic writing. I'm surprised the editors didn't call Harris on this and insist that it be done better. Or that her agent didn't tell her it wasn't ready for publication yet. SOMEONE should have said, this is a good start, now go back and make it your usual excellent writing. A HUGE disappointment from a beloved author.