After Dead by Charlaine Harris

Title: After Dead: What Came Next in the World of Sookie Stackhouse (Southern Vampire Mysteries #13.5)
Author: Charlaine Harris
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Publisher: Gollancz (31st October 2013)
Blurb:

Dead Ever After marked the end of the Sookie Stackhouse novels – a series that garnered millions of fans and spawned the hit HBO television show TrueBlood. It also stoked a hunger that will never die . . . a hunger to know what happened next.

With characters arranged alphabetically – from Ancient Pythoness to Bethany Zanelli – bestselling author Charlaine Harris takes her readers into the future of their favorite residents of Bon Temps and environs. If you’d like to learn how Michele and Jason’s marriage fared, what happened to Sookie’s cousin Hunter, and whether Tara and JB’s twins grew up to be solid citizens, this is the book for you.

Charlaine Harris will even reveal the details of Sookie’s own happily-ever-after . . . !

Rating: ** (2 stars)
Review:

In AFTER DEAD Charlaine Harris wraps up the unanswered questions in her SOOKIE STACKHOUSE/SOUTHERN VAMPIRE MYSTERIES series. Beginning with A and ending with Z, Harris relates what happens to the characters in her series once the events of DEAD EVER AFTER (review) ended.

I was quite excited to get my hands on this book, as I was told that it would reveal what happened next to all my favourite characters in Harris’ SOUTHERN VAMPIRE MYSTERIES. Whilst AFTER DEAD does exactly what it says on the tin, I was left desperately disappointed with this book. It felt more to me like Harris was trying to sell her new series to her old fans, than a final hoo-ha and leave-taking to a much-loved series.

Harris does include the stories of a lot of the minor characters in the book – we find out how Warren fared, for example. However, quite a lot of the time it’s only a sentence or two. Even some of the more major characters are lucky to have a page devoted to their futures. Sookie herself only gets three and a half pages of text. This in itself wouldn’t be too bad, but I frequently felt that the futures Harris reveals were ignoble – a disservice to the author herself, and the brilliant series she had created.

Fans of the series are going to want to get hold of a copy of this book, but to be honest if you can I would hold off until this book comes out in paperback or I would get the ebook. AFTER DEAD was a really nice idea, but the execution left me disappointed.