When readers must wait an entire year for a new entry in a beloved series, the pressure is on the author to deliver a book that will leave her readers satisfied and primed for the next installment. After reading Dead Reckoning, sad to say, I am neither.

The plot in this one is waaaaaaaaay heavy on vampire and fae politics and, if your interest level is similar to mine (lukewarm to cold), than this isn’t going to be your favorite installment in the series. In case you can’t tell by now, it certainly isn’t mine.

When the book opens, Merlotte’s has just been firebombed and it doesn’t take long for the reader to learn that Sandra Pelt, crazy ass sister of the were Sookie killed several books earlier, is out of jail and determined to take Sookie down. Sandra is just as crazy and mean as her sister and she’s a determined enemy to have.

Trouble is also brewing between Eric and Pam. It seems that Pam has fallen in love with a human who is near death from leukemia and Victor, the new Regent for the state of Louisiana, has forbidden Pam to make her a vampire. Pam blames Eric for not standing up to Victor over Pam’s right to create a vampire and is heartbroken at the impending loss.

Sookie is sharing her home at the moment with two of her fae relatives, cousin Claude and Uncle Dermot. The two are largely portrayed as cute but stooge-y sidekicks who occasionally get the privilege of info dumping to Sookie and the reader a bit more about her hidden past. In the meantime, Sookie still seems undecided about her relationship with Eric, while she and Bill seem to have settled into what largely amounts to a friendship. Bill makes it clear that his feelings are hardly avuncular, however, and he would happily take Sookie back in a moment.

Sookie’s ambivalence towards Eric is getting frustrating, frankly. She hems and haws in her internal monologues and I found myself thinking: In or out, honey. What’s it gonna be? Clearly, the author is dragging things out now for reasons that have little to do with storytelling and it’s getting absurd. Even more so when we learn in the second paragraph that it’s been just two years in Sookie time since her grandmother was murdered. Two years? How many supernatural creatures have tried to kill her in that short time? How many firebombs has she survived? How many supernatural boyfriends has she had? Sookie, my darling, it really is time to take a look at your life.

And I’m just going to say it: Sookie’s behavior (more than once, as a matter of fact) qualifies as nothing short of classic TSTL. Especially, ahem, for someone who is in mortal danger.

Great storytelling is about characters and I’m afraid the author completely lost the thread in this one. As it is she left a reader eagerly awaiting her yearly dose of Sookie Stackhouse with the feeling that Dead Reckoning was nothing more than a placeholder. Okay, so stuff happens (including a Big Damn Battle – whoopdeedoo), but we started with a cliffhanger and we end with a cliffhanger and nothing really happened in between. Well, nothing that I cared about, anyway.