Club Dead by Charlaine Harris

"You never told me all this before," I said, by way of explanation. "You all have divided America into kingdoms, is that right?"

Pam and Chow looked at Eric with some surprise, but he didn't regard them. "Yes," he said simply. "It has been so since vampires came to America. Of course, over the years the system's changed with the population. There were far fewer vampires in America for the first two hundred years, because the trip was so perilous. It was hard to work out the length of the voyage with the available blood supply." Which would have been the crew, of course. "And the Louisiana Purchase made a great difference."

Well, of course it would. I stifled another bout of giggles.

-Club Dead

Let's see, where did we leave off in the adventures of Sookie Stackhouse? She'd just survived a massacre in Dallas, and she was not psyched about Bill revealing his more animalistic, bloodthirsty side there. Also, some craziness went down with a maenad. Club Dead picks up only a few weeks later.* Bill is acting secretive and spending a lot of time on the computer (...), and Sookie is feeling a little put out. Then Bill leaves on a mysterious assignment...and disappears.

Bill is gone for pretty much the whole book, which worked out better than I might have expected when I started the series. I've grown a bit disenchanted with Bill.** Instead, we get the always awesome Eric, who comes to Bon Temps to lay out the situation with Sookie once he realizes Bill's disappearance is serious. This results in Sookie heading up to Jackson, Mississippi, where she plans to use her telepathic abilities to pick up leads on Bill's whereabouts. Sookie, accompanied by capable werewolf Alcide Herveaux*** heads to Club Dead, a local vampire/shapeshifter/werewolf haunt. Naturally, events unfold in a way that leave Sookie triumphant but in pretty rough shape. Again. Poor thing.

I found Club Dead a lot more enjoyable than Living Dead in Dallas. The plot was more engaging, even if Bill's computer project ended up being a bit of a McGuffin. I liked the new characters - particularly Alcide, but I was also intrigued by Russell Edgington, the king of Mississippi. I liked the ambiguity of the ending, which leaves me ready to read the next book.

Up next: I've made it a bit farther in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, but I have to confess I'm finding it a bit of a slog. When I read a sentence like, "Kundera here would say 'dancing,' and actually he's a perfect example of a belletrist whose intermural honesty is both formally unimpeachable and wholly self-serving: a classic postmodern rhetorician," I feel like I'm being poked in the brain. Repeatedly. I'm not calling it quits (yet), but it's slow going.

So, to spell myself from DFW, I got The Lost City of Z by David Grann from the library. In case you've missed the press on this one, it's about a journalist's quest to uncover the fate of a long-lost team of Amazonian explorers and learn about the ancient city they set out to find. Only a few pages in and I'm already finding it pretty riveting.

*I actually wish Charlaine Harris would space out the books in time a bit more, as when you realize that prior events have happened so recently, you feel as though you should still be hearing more about their ramifications. This was better handled here than in Living Dead in Dallas, though.

**Particularly given some of the stuff he gets up to in Club Dead. Bill is getting pretty sketchy, you guys.

***Although it is never stated, you have to imagine that Sookie is loving that moniker, considering she laughed herself silly over the ordinariness of Bill's name.