Amelia heads off to a town only reachable by ferry, and the more time she spends there the more familiar the place seems. Unfortunately, there are more pages contemplating her navel than developing a plot or characters. The only scary moments in this volume were bizarrely written as they all involve this formless, nameless, hallucinatory "evil" that plagues the town. Unsatisfying.

I really hate myself for reading these, but I'm really just hoping for the worst. Unfortunately, Stevens is incapable of writing a plot that has depth or a decent romance. And the poor editing killed me -- on one scene, Amelia is lying in bed next to Devlin, and in the next paragraph she gets out of bed and he is outside on the porch waiting for her. In another, she finds Shaw's cellphone and then when she finds him later she never mentions it or gives it back. The conclusion was weak and Amelia did nothing to enact it, proving herself just as boring and useless as ever.

I accidentally read the second book (this one) before the first, but thankfully Harris has the incredible ability to recap just enough so that you don't feel lost, and I didn't even realize I had missed a book until I came to log it on Goodreads. I loved every one of these unique and fascinating characters and their interactions felt real and magical all at once. I liked that it was set in the same world as the Sookie Stackhouse series and I got to see what a few characters were up to. This was a mesmerizing tale of a town like a compass for the paranormal made perfect by Harris' trademark ability to mix a large and varied cast of interesting characters into a snarled mess of disaster and untangle it all by the end. Highly recommend.

Amelia is a cemetery restorer who gets rudely interrupted in her task by the discovery of a dead body -- and then several more dead bodies. The Southern atmosphere and abundance of ghosts make this a truly chilling tale that I had to finish before I could even think of sleep. I liked the budding romance between Amelia and the detective Devlin, but I was disappointed that it didn't have any of the romance scenes I was expecting. It is a little hokey and there's not very much mystery around who the bad guy is, but it was a nice fast spooky read.

Absolutely uproarious, outrageous, and perfect.

A gripping, powerful, and sad book.

This book joins the list of my favorite kind of Southern story: full of biting wit, family, manners, heat, iced tea, and the past coming back to haunt you. It is a striking and well-drawn coming of age story for three women: a child, a twenty-four-year-old, and a thirty-something, but at the same time it is a mystery and a family drama and a love story and a tale of friendship. I laughed, my heart was touched, I wanted to have breakfast with these characters on their porch. Barrows' writing style could use some work; it was disconcerting every time the point of view switched from first person to third, and her characters do all have heavy internal monologues, but overall it is a book I would highly recommend.