Living Dead in Dallas

The second novel in the Sookie Stackhouse series begins with the northern Louisiana barmaid in a better place than the first.

The formerly lonely telepath has learned to control and strengthen her 'gift' at the urging of her boyfriend, who many once wary Bon Temps residents now affectionately call Vampire Bill.

But Sookie can't spend all of her time in the bedroom with Bill, although a great chunk of the novel is dedicated to that. Harris over-zealously drives home the point that sex with a vampire is apparently amazing.

Once again she's dragged into the middle of human and vampire affairs that she had nothing to do with because of her telepathy. An errand that involves her going undercover in the headquarters of an anti-vampire cult disguised as a church again puts Sookie in mortal danger from humans, not vampires.

For all of the enthralling drama that's complicated further by the addition of more vampires and shape shifters, the novel seems to wrap up succinctly with guilty parties meeting justice and hints toward future romantic complications in the series brewing from a past before Japanese synthetic blood and vampire tourism.