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MIDNIGHT CROSSROAD
by Charlaine Harris
Ace, reprint, April 2015
384 pages
$9.95
ISBN: 0425263169


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Manfred Bernardo is an on-line psychic, so it doesn't really matter where he lives as long as the internet connection is superb. Midnight, Texas happens to have surprisingly good connections for being such an out-of-the-way little town. Everyone is helpful as Manfred moves in, and he meets the people who make up the nucleus of Midnight. There is Bobo, his landlord and proprietor of the local Pawn Shop. There is Fiji, the woman who owns The Inquiring Mind shop. There are the people who run the local restaurant, not to be confused with the folks who run the local gas station/mini-mart. There are the two men who run the Antique Gallery and Nail Salon. Lemuel, who runs the Pawn Shop at night. His friend Olivia. Soon after Manfred moves in, he realizes he has found a place where he belongs.

The longer Manfred lives in Midnight, the more he discovers about the people around him. Fiji is in love with Bobo, who is mourning the loss or Aubrey, the woman who left him with no note, no reason, no nothing. Bobo has a past; his grandfather was a nationally known bigot who was rumored to have an amazing arsenal tucked away somewhere. There are people convinced that he left that arsenal to Bobo, and they want it. They want it very badly. Lemuel is a vampire, and sometimes misses his friends back in Bon Temps. Olivia - well, nobody knows much about Olivia beyond the fact that she travels quite a bit and is a good person to have on your side in a fight.

Eventually, the police become involved in Aubrey's disappearance - but not until her body is discovered at a town picnic out by the river. About the same time, the people who want the arsenal find out where Bobo lives, and life in Midnight gets pretty active for being just an intersection in the middle of Texas.

Charlaine Harris has been writing books for a long time, and she's been very successful. There's a reason for that - she's damn good at what she does. MIDNIGHT CROSSROADS is proof of that, as if any were needed. There are great and believable characters. The setting fits the story just perfectly. Everyone has a secret of some kind, so nobody wants to be the one pointing a finger at anyone else. Manfred, being a psychic, has a bit of an edge, but only at the beginning. This isn't quite as woo-woo as the Sookie Stackhouse books, at least not yet. There are aspects of the writing which are reminiscent of the Harper Connelly series, which to my mind is a good thing. Ms. Harris tells a great story, and isn't that what we all want?

§ P.J. Coldren lives in northern lower Michigan where she reads and reviews widely across the mystery genre when she isn't working in her local hospital pharmacy.

Reviewed by P.J. Coldren, March 2015

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