Dead as a Doornail (5th Sookie Stackhouse novel)

"Being with a vampire is almost as tension-free as being alone, except, of course, for the blood-sucking possibilities," explains Sookie Stackhouse in this fifth installment of her continuing adventures with vampires and other "supes", (werewolves, shapeshifters, goblins, witches, fairies, a maenad and, of course vampires): Dead as a Doornail (2005) by Charlaine Harris. Sookie has a kind of sardonic personality, and her irony gets sharper the deeper she delves into the world of the supernatural beings, aka, supes.


This is the first of the novels in this series where the plot is really strong. Of course, it helps that by this point, there is a strong meta-plot going through the series, which is Sookie's continuing initiation into the world of the supes and her romantic entanglements with Bill, Eric, Alcide, Calvin, and Sam, to hit the main ones. Sookie's attractive and young and has apparently good taste in men, at least physically.

This plot is actually similar to that in Dead Until Dark, the first in the Sookie series. An unknown killer is shooting people, including Sookie, and he/she needs to be found out and captured. Harris uses the metaplot to offer us plenty of suspects, such as the two private detectives investigating the death of Debbie Pelt, a shifter who came to an unfortunate end in Sookie's kitchen; Charles Twining, a one-eyed vampire bartender who had been a pirate in his human life; and, Mickey, a rogue vampire who takes up with Tara Thornton, who has morphed into a close childhood friend of Sookie's over the course of five novels.

Since the assassin is targeting the "two-natured" (shapeshifters), the Weres of Shreveport and the werepanthers of Hotshot, the inbred rural Pantherville village out from Bon Temps. In the previous novel, Sookie's dumb-but-sexy brother Jason was bitten repeatedly by a jealous werepanther and in this novel he begins experiencing his change during the full moon. He doesn't become an actual panther, but kind of a panther-man. Jason quickly learns to like it.

Sookie finds herself drawn more into the dark world of Were politics, via her friend and admirer Alcide. And she finds occasion to do some remodeling at the house her grandmother left her.

Sookie's acquaintance with the world of the fairies expands with a larger role for Claude, the brother of Sookie's fairy guardian Claudine. Like his sister, Claude has immense sex appeal for humans, although he prefers guys. And all fairies are intoxicatingly attractive for vampires.

Tags: charlaine harris, dead as a doornail, sookie stackhouse, true blood