CAIRNS BOOK REVIEW: An Ice Cold Cave by Charlaine Harris (Gollancz)

Fans of Harris will be excited to be returned to her world of Harper Connelly, the woman who can find dead bodies thanks to a nasty lightening strike when she was a teenager.

Travelling around the US with her ‘brother’ Tolliver Lang – actually her mother married his father after failed first marriages – Harper is called to yet another small town with a mysterious missing person.

Only this time Harper and Tolliver are drawn into a case that is worse than anything they’ve ever experienced.

Added to the tension is Harper’s growing realisation that she really doesn’t want Tolliver to be her brother anymore; she’d much rather he was something a lot more intimate but she can’t let him know in case she loses him forever.

Starting to search for a missing teenager, Harper stumbles across a horrifying burial of at least eight bodies.

This isn’t a case of a missing boy any more, it’s a serial killer.

Harris has an amazing ability to blend the real with the supernatural.

Like her other popular character Sookie Stackhouse, Harper is an ordinary woman who can do extraordinary things making her someone readers can easily identify with.

There are only a couple of practitioners of the supernatural speculative fiction who can pull it off without turning it into pulp fiction, Laurel K Hamilton and Lilith Saintcrow among them, but Harris is definitely one of the best.

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