Summer Reading #20

Midnight Crossing by Charlaine Harris

Yea! Met my summer reading goal, and there's still technically three weeks until summer is over for me.

I decided to read this because I so enjoyed Ms. Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series. I was expecting this to be a complete departure from all things vampires, werewolves, fairies, etc, and it wasn't-not completely anyway. There's a vampire, a psychic, and a witch in this book, and while the focus isn't so much on that aspect of the characters, I didn't know going in that there would be supernatural elements. Not that this is a problem; I quite like supernatural elements.

Midnight, Texas is a small town in west Texas. There are only a handful of residents. There's Fiji, the witch, who runs a spiritualist shop. There's the Rev who, obviously, runs the small chapel and pet cemetery. Across the street is the pawn shop, owned and run by Bobo, who lives upstairs. In the basement of the pawn shop are two apartments, occupied by Olivia and Lemuel, the latter is the vampire. Next to the pawn shop, lives Manfred, the psychic. On the other side of the pawn shop is the gas station, run by the Lovells-Shawn, Creek, and Connor. Next to that is the diner, run by Madonna, who is married to Teacher, and mother to Grady. Last is the antique shop and nail salon, owned and run by Chuy and Joe. See? Small town.

The crux of the story has to do with Bobo. Apparently, his grandfather, a huge white supremacist, died, leaving behind a huge cache of guns and weapons. This cache doesn't actually exist, but this doesn't stop people from approaching (and that is putting it nicely) Bobo to get their hands on these weapons. Aubrey, Bobo's girlfriend (who disappeared and is then found dead) was planted by the local white supremacist group to get the weapons. Then two guys show up at the diner looking for the same thing. Then two more people show up looking for these weapons that don't exist.  Bobo has been attacked because of these weapons, and the people of Midnight are trying to help him out.

Really, that's pretty much the book in a nutshell. I am hoping that the other books in the series have more going on, and that this was just laying the groundwork for the series. I am not in a huge hurry to check them out, however. This doesn't mean I haven't enjoyed this book; it just means I have others that I will be reading first.