Grave Sight: Not Your Typical Charlaine Harris Book

On the very last day before the public library closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, I made a frantic trip to snatch up as many books as I could. Grave Sight was one of the books that I grabbed because I enjoy Charlaine Harris’ light, quirky paranormal mystery books. I also chose this book because it was the only first book in her various series that the library had in stock that I hadn’t already read.

Grave Sight (2005)
Written by: Charlaine Harris
Genre: Paranormal Mystery
Pages: 263 (Hardback)
Series: Harper Connelly Mysteries, Book #1
Publisher: The Pengiun Group

The premise:

Harper Connelly has what you might call a strange job: she finds dead people. She can sense the final location of a person who’s passed, and share their very last moment. Harper and her stepbrother Tolliver are experts at getting in, getting paid, and then getting out of town fast — because the people who hire Harper have a funny habit of not really wanting to know what she has to tell them.

At first, the little Ozarks town of Sarne seems like no exception. A teenage girl has gone missing, but the secrets of her death — and the secrets of the town — are deep enough that even Harper’s special ability can’t uncover them. With hostility welling up all around them, she and Tolliver would like nothing better than to be on their way. But then another woman is murdered. And the killer’s not finished yet…

Spoilers Ahead.

Discussion: I find the cover of this edition of Grave Sight is aggressively ugly. Three figures hold paintings in front of their faces in a room covered with pink, floral, old lady wallpaper. The two male figures hold up portraits of men, but the female figure holds up a painting of a skull. It doesn’t exactly make sense in relation to the plot of the book, other than many of the characters are hiding secrets. I doubt that I would have picked up the book if I hadn’t already read other books by Charlaine Harris.

The cover is definitely not the last bizarre thing about this book. After being struck by lightning as a teenager, Harper Connelly develops the ability to sense dead bodies and to see the last 15 seconds or so before their death. She turns this into her job and her brother, Tolliver, serves as her manager and bodyguard. Harper is prone to panic attacks during storms and is very dependent on Tolliver. You get the impression that they are a little too close. They’re each jealous of the other’s sexual partners and Harper thinks “I loved hugging Tolliver, who was bony and hard and warm. I loved to listen to the air going in and out of his lungs, the swoosh of his heart” (p. 71).

I’m a good writer, but some things can only be expressed with a gif:

via GIPHY

Now if you read the premise closely, you already knew that Harper and Tolliver are step-siblings. If you didn’t, you go most of the book thinking that Harper is sexually interested in her actual brother. Attraction to a step-sibling you were raised with is still a “yikes” from me, but you would think that Harper would go out of her way to emphasize that she and Tolliver are not biologically related, but she introduces him as her brother and even refers to him as her brother in her thoughts.

Charlaine Harris’ books are usually pretty lighthearted, in spite of the murders and violence. Grave Sight is decidedly darker in tone. Harper’s mother and stepfather are drug addicts and her mother tried to “sell” her to a drug dealer in exchange for free samples. The older children have to raise their younger half-siblings. The family is further broken when Harper’s sister, Cameron, vanishes without a trace and social services step in. This does somewhat explain Harper and Tolliver’s unusual feelings for each other, but I wondered who took care of Harper after she was struck by lightning.

Because Harper has to travel to find dead bodies, Grave Sight lacks the distinct sense of place that I expect from Harris’ books. Bon Temps, Louisiana, where The Southern Vampire Mysteries is set, has tons of Southern charm. The Midnight, Texas series revolves around the quirky, intriguing town. Both towns feel like real places that I have visited. Sarne, Arkansas, the city that Harper and Tolliver get stuck in is dull, depressing, and the townspeople are awful. Grave Sight is also missing the fascinating, well-developed secondary characters that most Harris books have, like Sookie’s great-grandfather, Niall, from The Southern Vampire Mysteries or Lem, the town vampire in Midnight, Texas. None of the characters other than Harper really stand out. Local police officer Hollis exists to take Harper for a milkshake and have sex with her, pretty much immediately after talking about his recently deceased ex-wife. Just about everyone in this book could use a session with a therapist.

In conclusion: In retrospect, a book in which the main characters are trapped in a dismal Ozarks town was not the best choice to take my mind off quarantine. I did enjoy Harper’s unique psychic power (the ability to sense dead bodies and experience the moment of their deaths), but I wish that this book had a better mystery. I easily figured out the twist. I like that Charlaine Harris wrote a darker, more somber book, but Grave Sight is not as well-written as her other books. It’s possible that I may read the other books in this series when the library finally opens back up, because all of Harris’ books are easy reads and I do want to know what happens to these characters.