Review: Dark & Disorderly by Bernita Harris

Dark & Disorderly by Bernita Harris
Carina Press (June 2010)
Ebook: $5.99
ISBN: 978-1-4268-9033-8

Favorite Lines: “A momentary and very bleak vision intruded: myself, despised and unemployable, years hence, holed up in my little house, surrounded b twenty-nine stray cats, forty-nine stray dogs and an equal number of homeless ghosts that I’d gathered for company.” (p. 148 )

“I was standing there naked when my dead husband walked into my bathroom…”

Lillie St. Claire is a Talent, one of the rare few who can permanently dispatch the spirits of the dead that walk the earth. Her skills are in demand in a haunted country, where a plague of ghosts is becoming a civic nuisance.

Those skills bring her into conflict with frightened citizens who view Talents as near-demons. Her husband comes to see her as a Freak; so when Nathan dies after a car crash, she is relieved to be free of his increasingly vicious presence. Lillie expects to be haunted by Nathan’s ghost, but not to become Suspect #1 for her husband’s murder and reanimation.

But what’s most surprising of all is the growing attraction between her and psi-crime detective John Thresher. He thinks that Lillie killed Nathan–and Nathan must agree, because his zombie is seeking revenge. Now she and Thresher must work together to solve her husband’s murder–before his corpse kills her…

Dark & Disorderly is a paranormal romantic suspense written by Bernita Harris. It takes place in a world in which ghosts have made themselves visible. In response to the dead, some humans seem to have mutated on a genetic level to help deal with the problem. Those people are usually marked by their white hair. They walk a thin line between being respected and feared/despised by other humans.

I want to start by saying, “I never saw the twist this book took.” Some people will call me slow for not seeing where the author took the story. I think the author did an excellent job distracting me with all of the events taking place that I lost sight of the direction the story was taking. I thought I was reading a romance; what I got was urban fantasy. I’m not complaining. I was in the mood for a HEA and I didn’t get one. It’s not a fault of the author, just one of those quirks readers have that matter only to the reader.

Let’s discuss the characters. I really enjoyed several of them, but one that I didn’t = Detective John Thresher. He was so wishy-washy that I couldn’t stand him. I wanted him to fail at everything. He pissed me off throughout the entire story. On the other hand there was Lillie. I liked her. She was strong enough to say what was on her mind and to protect herself. For the most part she avoided TSTL territory and she didn’t put up with a hero’s bad treatment. She called him on it.

Would I recommend this book to a friend? I don’t know. It’s only available in ebook format and it’s the first book in a series. It’s entertaining, the world building was great, the suspense had me wondering…but I hated the hero. This is one of those books that I liked, but don’t see myself reading about. It wasn’t bad…it wasn’t great…it just was.

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