Day Shift - Charlaine Harris

"Day Shift" continues the story of the small Texas town of Midnight, that started with "Midnight Crossroad"

 

Charlaine Harris uses Midnight as a place to collect characters from her earlier books, mix them with other enigmatic inhabitants with supernatural skills and or unusual gifts and get them involved with events that range from the slightly strange to the fundamentally weird.

 

If you have an afternoon to spare and you're in the mood for a gentle supernatural mystery, seasoned with quiet humour and mostly nice people trying to be mostly good, you'll enjoy this book.

 

If you're looking for fast-paced excitement, hair-raising thrills, and maybe some eroticised blood spilling, move on to a different book.

 

This is an afternoon television kind of Urban Fantasy. Think "Warehouse 13" with even less going on. It's a soap, stocked with characters looking for a plot.

 

Of course, it's a Charlaine Harris soap, so it's well written and the characters hold the attention but really, nothing much happens here. Midnight is a kind of Urban Fantasy Lake Wobegone. It invites you to come sit awhile and catch up with your favourite characters in an environment that is odd but somehow benign.

 

I enjoyed "Day Shift" (I have no idea why it's called that) enough to finish it but not enough to be waiting eagerly for the next one. If there is a next one, I may wander through it but I won't be expecting much by way of excitement except one or two small surprises.