Review: Day Shift (Midnight, Texas #2) by Charlaine Harris

Midnight, Texas is full of all kinds of weird residents.

It’s a one light town in the middle of nowhere Texas and its residents are witches, vampires, and all sorts of supernatural beings.

Manfred is a psychic and has been enjoying his time in Midnight.

It’s quiet and everyone stays out of everyone else’s business…..everyone in Midnight is secretive about their lives which is fine by Manfred.

Well the most mysterious of the Midnight bunch is Olivia, no one seems to know anything about her other than that she lives with a vampire and she’s smoking hot.

One weekend Manfred is visiting Dallas for a work conference when he sees Olivia with a couple who is later found dead. Then to Manfred’s shock, one of his most wealthy clients dies in the middle of a reading!

He returns back to Midnight hounded by the press and surrounded by scandal. Deep down he knows that Olivia is somehow connected to all this and that she can help.

This series is ambitious when it comes to POV characters. In Harris’s Sookie books, we almost exclusively read from Sookie’s POV but in this series we have multiple narrators and POV characters….Fiji, Bobo, Manfred…..on one hand it worked well having a new fresh voice or perspective throughout the book but on the other hand something about it seemed too ‘busy’ for me. I would have liked just one single narrative.

In the previous book, it took a while to get to the murder mystery part. In this book we jumped right in which I liked much better. There wasn’t as much time spent ‘world building’, instead we got right into the intrigue and mystery……much better than the first book.

Harris likes to include cameos from other characters in some of her other series. Manfred is actually a character from her Harper Connelly series and now has his own ‘mystery’ series with this. I haven’t read any of Harris’s other series so I can’t fully appreciate these appearances, but I have read the Sookie books and I loved that this latest installment of the Midnight series included cameos from Bon Temps.

I love that she does this….some could argue that it’s ‘hokey’ or unnecessary but I think it’s kind of fun when other characters turn up. It makes it feel like the supernatural world is small and cozy so for me this worked well.

The first book for me was more about building Midnight and constructing characters and such rather than being about the mystery. In that aspect this book was much better and fast paced. I think one thing that is lacking from this series for me and perhaps why I’m not devouring them like I have Harris’s Sookie books, is the lack of romance.

There is a hint of a romance between Bobo and Fiji but it doesn’t really seem to go anywhere. What I liked about Harris’s other book is that she includes a healthy dose of romance and mystery together so maybe that’s what I am missing in this book/series.

Harris is a very strong mystery writer and I love how her unique, quirky voice comes through in all her books, and this is why I continue to read her books. She thinks outside the box and always manages to construct a rich super natural world.

I liked this book better than the first because we got right into the mystery but I am hoping that in future books, Harris adds more of a romance angle for readers looking for that sort of thing.

Challenge/Book Summary:

Book: Day Shift (Midnight, Texas #2) by Charlaine Harris

This book counts toward: NA

• Hosted by: NA
• Books for Challenge Completed: NA

Recommendation: 3.5 out of 5

Genre: Urban fantasy, paranormal, mystery, witch lit, fantasy

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