Reading this comic series is my excuse not to put myself through any lengthy Charlaine Harris disappointments again. I've repeatedly thought about reading her Harper Conolly series, but everyone says it's not as good as the Sookie novels and even those have gone massively downhill. So the easy way out is to read the graphic novels - you get the general gist of what's happpening without spending hours on a series that is just going to sputter out and die towards the end.

As it happens, I thought this was a decent opening and I look forward to reading further installments condensed into graphic novel format. Harper Conolly was struck by lightning as a child and has gained the strange ability to locate dead people and sense how they died, sounds interesting enough and so far it is. Harper Conolly, as much as I can tell from a graphic novel, seems a very different character from Sookie Stackhouse. Physically, she reminds me of Lisbeth from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, no blonde-haired, big-boobed girly-girl here it seems - but then it's hard to get a huge grasp on the characters when reading a graphic novel (one of the downsides). She also seems a lot more of a detached and "I take shit from no one" kind of heroine, which is fine by me.

I will definitely look out for more, there wasn't enough here to really rate successfully so I might re-think the 3 stars as the series progresses.