My Review of "Dead As A Doornail"

Written by Charlaine Harris
Released in 2005

Sookie (to herself): “You ever just feel like stomping around and being miserable for a while? That was the kind of mood I was in.”

As these books continue, I seem to notice quite a lot of things. Namely that Sookie’s love interests seem to be on the increase. Here you’ve got Bill, Eric, Alcide, Calvin, Sam and now Quinn into the mix. At this point she might have to beat them all off with a stick.

Bill’s doing his level best to make Sookie jealous with a new girlfriend named Selah. For the most part, while Sookie can’t seem to stand her, she isn’t all that bothered by her. It also might have done her self esteem wonders when Bill tried to get Sam out of the way. Yes, this one both Sookie and Sam share a brief kiss. As you do.

Sam had something of a bigger role in this book when an assassin was going around shooting shifters and weres. A good part of the book teased the notion that Jason might have been responsible, even though as a reader you don’t ever think that he could be capable of such. After all, he seems to love being a were-panther quite a lot. That bit surprised me given Jason’s past issues with the supernatural.

The assassin bit of the book takes up a lot and seemed resolved when recent Merlotte’s cook, Sweetie admitted to the crime. What it is with cooks at Merlotte’s? They don’t exactly seem to last that long do they? The loose end with the seemingly nice Charles being responsible for Sam’s death felt a little too tacked on. I knew it was too good to be true.

When we’re not dealing with assassins, Sookie and Alcide seem to devolve before our eyes. I thought Alcide confronting Sookie on killing Debbie Pelt would’ve been the thing that tore them apart but it was Sookie’s discomfort of Alcide dragging her into were politics that really did it for them.

Was it Sookie’s fault that Jackson died in the fight against Patrick? Nope! She alerted Quinn about Patrick’s cheating so to be fair, the pack themselves condemned Jackson by not calling off the fight so to speak. Of course Alcide didn’t take it that way. Still while Sookie might have fallen out with Alcide, she did seem to connect a little with Quinn.

As for Eric, of course he was going to try and get to the bottom of his lost days. Sookie should’ve known better and in the end, it was wise that she told more or less what happened during the Witch wars. Now it’ll be interesting to see where the pair of them go from here.

However taking all of Sookie’s love woes but keeping the supernatural elements intact, two incredibly strong plots in this story was Sookie’s friendship with Claudine and Claude. Fairy jokes aside, these are two characters that I certainly enjoyed in this book and luckily, it seems that we’re getting more of them in later ones.

As for Sookie trying to protect Tara from abusive vampire Mickey, well this was this first time it actually felt like they were friends. We’ve had plenty of chatter about them being pals but Sookie going above and beyond to try and save her friend proved the friendship between them. This is probably the most vocalised book for Tara so far in the series.

- The end of this book set up the plot for the next one, “Definitely Dead”. We’re going to meet the Queen of Louisiana.
- Not that it will shock anyone with Sookie’s poor taste in puns but Claude is gay. Sookie certainly seemed to appreciate his physical attributes.
- In this book, Sookie had her house set alight by Charles, was invested by private detectives looking for Debbie Pelt and was shot by Sweetie as well.
- Andy seemed to be aware that a certain dog was human. If he had looked harder, he might have guessed it was Sam.

These books seem to improve as they go on and “Dead As A Doornail” certainly worked for me. It gave us more stuff on Jason, Sam and especially Tara and hopefully future books will maintain that.

Rating: 9 out of 10.