Saturday, June 9, 2012

Deadlocked




Deadlocked (Sookie Stackhouse, #12)Sookie is summoned to Eric’s house to greet Felipe, King of Louisiana (among others). There she discovers Eric feeding off another woman, who shortly ends up on Eric’s front lawn, dead. The police have already been summoned and the whole situation is suspicious.

Sookie helps Bill Compton investigate the murder and find out the truth of why someone would want to frame Eric. In the meantime, Sookie is dealing with a horde of fairies and the secret fairy charm given to her Gran by Fintan, now entrusted to Sookie. The underworld has found out Sookie possess the charm and everyone wants it.

I hate to say this but I think this series has run its course and is now dying a slow death. I loved the first handful of books in this series but the last couple has been bad. Deadlocked was no exception.  For most of the book, nothing happens. Pages are spent with detailed descriptions of Sookie’s day and nothing happens. There are whole conversations which do nothing to move the plot along. The plotline was convoluted and pulled at a bunch of threads that are finally pulled haphazardly together.

There were no real Eric and Sookie moments and those we do see are disappointing and unfinished, obviously a cliffhanger with the intention of keeping us coming back for more. Their relationship also seems to be in shambles and would have been better to kill it off.  The scenes Eric are in (only a few) he spends in angsty contemplation of the situation his maker has left him, to marry Freyda or stay with Sookie, but big bad Eric cannot seem to make a decision.

There was only a glimpse of Pam in this book and you can always count on Pam’s snarkiness for a few good laughs but the scenes (two) she was in were flat. Ditto for Bill, we get you are in love with Sookie but can’t Charlaine give this character anything else to talk about? Apparently not. It’s starting to feel like a teen angsty series instead of the really great urban fantasy this series started out as.

Besides Sookie’s day to day life (working at Merlotte’s, getting the mail and taking an awful lot of naps), the secondary characters who were always that, get more air time than the original characters. JB du Rone has a bigger cameo than Eric, Bill and Pam.

I was really disappointed with this book but if I’m honest with myself I wasn’t expecting much after the last two. I will read the last book in the series (due out next May) but only because I’ve read all of the other books and I need to see it through to the bloody end, but I am not anticipating it. 

2 comments:

  1. I havent read the last couple but I started to get disappointed about the middle of the series. There were a lot of plot holes that made me wonder if I had missed a book or something previously in the series. The adding of all the extra super-natural elements felt like it was getting too bogged down and trying to do too much. IT was about the time that True Blood came out and became a success that the series really started to die. Which is tragic bc I really enjoyed the first part of the series. But I am like you and once I start a series I have to find out how it ends no matter how bad it gets..

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  2. I agree, I like the show so much better than the books now and I usually go the other way and believe the books are always better. Agreed, there are way too many supernatural elements now, I liked the series so much when it was just the vamps and the supes.

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