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Day Shift (Midnight, Texas #2)
Charlaine Harris
Published: May 5, 2015 (Ace)
Purchase: Book Depository or Amazon
Review source: copy provided by publisher in exchange for an honest review
Review by: Chelsea
Rating (out of 5): 4 stars
Note: This review will be spoiler-free, but will assume you’re familiar with the characters in the Midnight, Texas series. If you haven’t started, we suggest reading our review of Midnight Crossroad.
Day Shift, like so many engaging mysteries, picks up steam as you delve further into its story. The novel begins at a meander—it took me three chapters before I was hooked back into the world set in Midnight Crossroad. The easy pace at the opening of the novel is a clever deception on Charlaine Harris’s part. She’s such a master of this. She skips from one eccentric Midnight resident to another touching on day-to-day minutiae that give the novel the feeling of a languid character study. Toward the end of the novel, though, you’ll be sprinting to solve mysteries.
The rich ensemble she’s crafted for this series is engaging and curious and Day Shift gives us more. We learn more about each of the characters, what makes so many of them more than human, but questions aren’t easily answered in Midnight. There are far too many secrets for that. And perhaps that’s why I was hooked the second we had chapters from Olivia’s point of view. While Manfred, the key protagonist of the first novel, is again front-and-center, Olivia is equally so this time. She’s engaging and fascinating and has the right amounts of ingenuity and darkness to make me crave every passage with her.
While Day Shift focuses on its characters, the deeper we get into the story, the more the plot winds. More secrets are revealed, and by the end I found myself rushing forward to get the answer of the whodunit instead of simply wanting more time in Olivia’s head.
Without giving any of the clever twists away, I was shocked to discover that the Midnight, Texas world coincides with that of the Sookie Stackhouse one. An ancillary character everyone will recognize makes an appearance in this book, and fit right in with the Midnight crew. It was curveball, and at first I balked a bit, but quickly everything fell in to place and I understood the decision. Plus, it’s like an Easter Egg for the Sookie fans.
Harris continues to be a master at the character-driven story. Day Shift has a cast worthy of your investment and intrigue piled upon intrigue. I’m eager to get back to Midnight, Texas just to unearth more of their secrets.
Sexual content: References to sex and rape
I haven’t started this series yet, but I did know that it crosses over. In the anthology Games Creatures Play, there’s a story where Manfred Bernardo goes to Merlotte’s and talks to Sookie.
I usually love quirky small towns, so I may have to pick these up soon.
I bought that anthology, but haven’t read it. (TBR woes are real!) But Manfred does mention meeting Sookie, though she isn’t the person we encounter in DAY SHIFT.
A lot of these characters come from another set. Manfred comes from the Grave set. Bobo comes from Shakespeare (Lily Bard) set (and Lily and Jack made a cameo in one of the Sookie books). The sheriff (Smith) is from the Aurora Teagarden set.