B&N made a wondrous error and handed over my copy of Cross Your Heart the Thursday before its release. Wanna guess what I stayed up Thursday night doing? Take a WILD guess. Yeah, I was up until around 3am reading it straight through. I will go back in the near future and read through it slowly, but I can tell you now that Michele delivered - again - with her Broken Heart series.
The Setting - is still Broken Heart, Oklahoma. A few years have come and gone since everyone became undead and things are sort of settling into a normal routine of sudden-life-or-death and peace-and-quiet. This time around, you get more of a sense of where the town came from; those deep down roots behind why the town is cursed. You know what curse I'm talking about.
The Characters - oh Lord have mercy! It took me a little bit to get into the "hoity-toity" voice of cultured Elizabeth Bretton. I was so used to the sarcastic, down and dirty kind of women like Phoebe and Jessica that Elizabeth kinda threw me at the beginning. I had a scare two chapters in that, *gasp*, I might not like Elizabeth! Never fear. She wins you over though it's totally Tez you're rooting for. Come on, sexy smexy were-jag? And he goes all cave man to her social etiquette. It's a riot on the page. Other staples of the Broken Heart community appear, as well as some distant relations no one ever expected to visit.
The Plot - seven books into a series, a very connected series where each book builds off of another, you really have to wonder what else you can do? But Michele pulls it out of a hat in Cross Your Heart. I was a little skeptical when I read that it was a ghost story, kinda a mystery thing. Mysteries are okay, but I don't usually like them as much as adventure stories. However, there is so much of the history of Broken Heart twined around the mystery that it helps give the whole series a more grounded feel.
