‘He’s not in the pond,’ Beck said, without preamble.
Ah yes, we return to plot number two: the disappearance of Jason Stackhouse. The police are descending en masse to Sookie’s house to tell her some updates on Jason. She panics about them seeing men’s shirts in the house (why….) and that Alcee Beck, the office who beats prisoners and Sookie refuses to tell anyone about, is uneasy about being alone in a white woman’s house. Probably because he can’t beat her or force her to pay him a bribe. Andy Bellefleur and Catfish Hennessey come round and tell her that the boot print on the dock is probably Jason’s, and the blood is feline. Feline as in panther.
Panthers were what we called mountain lions.
uh, why? Why not call mountain lions mountain lions? Panthers and lions are entirely different animals. You wouldn’t call an apple an orange.
The men think Jason is probably dead, having shot the mountain lion (I AM not going to call them panthers), trailed it through the woods in the middle of the night on his own, and then was mauled by the injured animal. Yeah. Why are the police in these books so stupid?
What they didn’t get was that [...] Jason’s favourite person in the entire universe was Jason Stackhouse and he would not endanger that person in such an obvious way.
THIS.
The police then ask if Maria-Star, the injured were, had any connection to Jason for reasons that I’m entirely sure about.
‘See, what we were thinking,’ Alcee Beck rumbled, ‘is that this girl was one of Jason’s discards, and maybe he was keeping her somewhere secret? But you let her go when Jason disappeared.’
That is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read. Why would they think this? What is wrong with the police force in Bon Temps that they would even begin to consider this as a possibility? There are no clues for this that I’ve read so far. It’s entirely left field.
‘With Jason getting arrested under suspicion of those murders last year and all, we wondered if there wasn’t some fire under all that smoke.’
What? The murders for which you have arrested, tried and imprisoned a suspect for? A suspect that willingly confessed to acting entirely on his own for these murders and if you look back at my reviews for Dead Until Dark, there wasn’t any concrete evidence for Jason’s involvement, other than some very tenuous circumstantial evidence. And that’s ignoring the fact that YOU ARE TALKING TO THE ONLY SURVIVING VICTIM OF THE BON TEMPS SERIAL KILLER, WHO WAS CHASED THROUGH HER HOME AND HER WOODS BY THIS MAN, BEFORE BEING BEATEN INTO SUBMISSION BY HIM.
So this theory about Jason being Rene’s accomplice is utter bullshit. I’m calling ‘padding’.
Then Catfish launched himself off the couch like a bottle rocket. ‘No,’ he bellowed. ‘You guys asked me to come along to break this bad news about the panther to Sookie. No one said anything about this stuff about some girl that got hit by a car! This here is a nice girl.’ Catfish pointed at me. ‘No one’s going to call her different! Not only did Jason Stackhouse never have to do more than crook his little finger at a girl for her to come running, much less take one hostage and do weird stuff to her, but if you’re saying Sookie let this Cooper girl free when Jason didn’t come home , and then tried to run over her, well, all I got to say is, you can go to hell!’
God bless Catfish Hennessey is all I had to say.
Indeed.
Catfish has arranged a search party of Jason’s woods as he’s a neat guy. He gets to go to the permanent rainbow paradise where the good characters go to live. On an aside note, my copy of Dead to the World is littered with terrible grammatical typos. Take a look at this:
Not only do people like to help in our small town – but also rumours had inevitably begun circulating about the mysterious wild animal footprint.
That dash doesn’t need to be there, just FYI.
The whole town is out for the search party, and it’s like a jamboree. Nice. Calvin and Crystal Norris have shown up, bringing a guy called Felton Norris, to help out Sookie. She treks through the woods with them and notices how odd they are for weres. They’re sandy coloured and walk in a particularly feline way.
… they’re mountain lions aren’t they? How long is it going to take for Sookie to work that one out?
Calvin is very strangely protective towards Sookie until Crystal is suddenly gored by a razorback pig, which I’m presuming is the one from Living Dead in Dallas. Felton and Calvin suddenly struggle with… bloodlust? I’m not sure.
Felton seemed to be normal, until I observed what was at the end of his arms. They weren’t really hands anymore… but not really wolf paws, either. They were something very odd, something big and flat and clawed.
He’s a mountain lion.
The search party dissipates, and Sam tells Sookie that apparently Calvin showed up to court her. How nice.
Pam calls to tell Sookie that tonight they are going to war with the witches. Huzzah.
These witches were bad, and bad should be stopped; bad should be overcome. That’s the American model.
Not just American, I think you’ll find. I’m rather insulted by that. Thanks Sookie, for assuming that Americans are the only ones with any ethics or morals in the world.
Dottie Smith
