Bingeable series: Harper Connelly

Continuing with the Halloween-y theme from the Recommendsday post, this week’s series is Charlaine Harris’s Harper Connelly series, which as I mentioned in the kindle offers posts, is mostly on offer this month.

So the set up here: Harper was struck by lightning as a child, and she has been left with the ability to sense dead people and see the last moments of their lives. She makes her living helping track down bodies – and across the course of the series she tackles four jobs that get her in more trouble than usual. She’s accompanied by her stepbrother Tolliver – who is her best friend and business manager and Definitely Not Her Blood Relation. Tolliver’s dad married Harper’s mum, blended their existing families and had two more kids together. The parents were also drug addicts and Harper and her sister Cameron along with Tolliver did a lot of the work to bring up the babies, while their older brother Mark moved out and tried to earn money to help. All this came crashing down when Cameron when missing. Eight years on, Harper is still searching for her sister’s body.

I’ve actually tested the bingeable nature of this series this week – because once I started rereading the first one at the start of the week ahead of writing this post, I ended up reading all four of them back to back. If that doesn’t make them bingeable what does. Yes I still have some resignations about the turn the series takes in romance terms – although on the reread the signposting is clearer – and the first sex scene remains not great – but I got sucked back into the individual cases and really into that overarching story of the series.

Aside from Harper’s special ability, there’s not a lot of other paranormal or supernatural action in this – in fact a lot of the time Harper meets with extreme scepticism about her abilities and her job lands her in both trouble and danger quite a lot. But there’s also a connection to one of Harris’s other series: Manfred Barnado appears in this in increasing frequency through the books and of course he’s the main character in the Midnight, Texas series where it becomes clear that Harris is working in an extended universe type situation, which adds to the Halloween appropriate-ness of it all.

Anyway, they’re very readable, and as I mentioned in the Kindle deals post the other day, three of the four are 99p at the moment, so although you will have to pay more for the first one, you can get the whole lot for less than £9, so the average price is pretty good

Have a great weekend everyone.