All Together Dead / Charlaine Harris

4 out of 5 stars

Louisiana cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse has her hands full dealing with every sort of undead and paranormal creature imaginable. And after being betrayed by her longtime vampire love, Sookie must not only deal with a new man in her life—the shapeshifter Quinn—but also contend with the long-planned vampire summit.

The summit is a tense situation. The vampire queen of Louisiana is in a precarious position, her power base weakened by hurricane damage to New Orleans. And there are some vamps who would like to finish what nature started. Soon, Sookie must decide what side she'll stand with. And her choice may mean the difference between survival and all-out catastrophe.

2019 Re-Read

Another evening, another Sookie Stackhouse book. At least I managed to cook some dinner last night, although my kitchen is still a mess. I have to find a way out of this groove I have found myself in—there are other things I need to be reading and other tasks that need my attention. But I may only find the way out by finishing up this series as a re-read.

I’ve always felt that this is the book where Sookie proves that she has good judgment—she seems to understand the plots and conspiracies of the vamp world better than they do, perhaps because she’s an outsider to that world and able to observe it dispassionately. This talent of hers, which Eric calls “thinking outside the box,” attracts unwanted attention from the Queen and her sidekick, Andre. Staying unbound to them is proving difficult. Instead, she ends up bound to Eric the Uncertain.

Eric runs hot and cold towards Sookie, unwilling to admit that he’s unusually attracted to a human woman. It seems kind of like the men who’d like to sleep with a woman but don’t want to be seen with her in public. Good for Sookie, standing up for herself and her right to be acknowledged.

I think just about everyone has been unappreciated at a job at some point in their life. Sookie gets her moment of this as she holds a bomb that she’s scared to set down, waiting for the bomb squad to show up, talking to a bystander about her status in the vamp scene:

”Ha,” I said. “Oh, ha-ha. Yeah, ‘cause they love me. You see how many vampires are up here? Zero, right?”
“One,” said Eric, stepping out of the stairwell.

Lots of foreshadowing for upcoming installments. On to book 8, From Dead to Worse this evening.