Midnight is a quiet town like no other, in the middle of
rural Texas, with few people passing through. It’s a quiet place, an insular
place, a place where the few inhabitants have each other’s back – but keep
their secrets to themselves.
Manfred is a new inhabitant to the town and quickly finds the secrets run deep and there is far more than he imagined. Some of these secrets become exposed when a body is found…
This book shows Charlaine Harris’s main strength from the
very beginning. Charlaine Harris has a great talent for truly describing a
place, really getting a sense of what the town of Midnight is like. But it’s
not just the place, Charlaine is extremely good at describing a community and
how they all relate to each other. Even really small or background characters
are fit into the overall community and the characters that make up the
location.
This especially works with this series because it is such
a small community as well as the very nature of the community. It’s interesting
to see how close and supportive everyone is of each other, while at the same
time following Mightnight’s unwritten rules – complete acceptance and not
asking any questions. It’s a town for the misfits and people who can’t find
somewhere to fit in anywhere else and this is really well presented – not with
everyone having to be freaky or weird or odd to stand out – but just this really
subtle way everyone’s secrecy has been woven into the community to create a set
of unwritten rules that no-one ever has to overtly say though they’re always
clearly understood.
There is a problem with pacing. This is the first book in
the series and there’s a lot of introduction and description including a lot
that probably isn’t necessary. A lot of the earlier part of the book is taken
up setting the scene with rather more excessive detail than is necessary that
clogs things a little. Especially since it seems to be a while before anyone
actually gets involved in any murder investigation (though I did like the
moment when Manfred questioned why they’re investigating at all since none of
them are police). This slows down the general mystery as well for some time –
which is a minor element of dissatisfaction along with a completely
unpredictable ending.
One thing the book has is a separatist, white supremist,
racist, misogynist, homophobic group. The depiction is pretty good – they’re
not soft peddled or excused, they’re a repulsive as you’d expect. But they’re
repulsive without the need to turn them into outright cartoonish caricatures,
some of them are very very human and even nice (so long as the person they’re
being nice to is a nice White Woman) but the hatred is clear. A nasty bigot
doesn’t have to be frothing, they can be surprisingly pleasant people – but they’re
still repellent bigots. It also brings
in some nicely weird things happening like the whole Sovereignty Movement and
the bizarre actual belief that people can set up personal and pseudo states
basically by claiming they have. It was pretty well done managing to revile,
mock and depict these people as the danger they are. But also make it clear
they are not the only sources of bigotry and people shunned the POC or gay
people without being part of the hate groups.
