In 2005 Charlaine Harris (True Blood) started a series of books (4 in all) about Harper Connelly who can sense the bodies of the lost dead.
Harper doesn’t see ghosts, she finds dead bodies. Or not-lost bodies. She can sense the dead and sometimes she can experience clues of what may have happened to the deceased or how long they’ve been dead. She and her step-brother have managed to make a living doing this.
Early Childhood – Teen Trauma
Harper’s parents were both criminal attorneys, but their fondness for their clients’ drugs led to their downfall. Within her childhood, Harper can remember going from being relatively well-to-do to being trailer-trash. Her father either died or disappeared and her mother remarried another fallen-attorney, Matthew Lang, who enters the marriage with two sons, Mark and Tolliver, to match Harper and her sister, Cameron.
With the new “father” Harper soon has two younger sisters Grace and Mariella, though they suffered from signs of fetal alcohol and drug syndrome. The sibling groups soon became a team, caring for each other and the babies and when Mark turned 18 and left it was Harper, Cameron and Tolliver against the world. Then, at age 15, Harper was struck by lightning. From that point on she could sense the dead. Soon after that, her older sister Cameron disappeared, never to be seen again.
Make it A Career!
After Cameron disappeared the family and their circumstances were revealed. Harper was put in foster care, the babies went to a maternal aunt in Texas, and Tolliver went to live with his brother for the short while he had left as a minor. As soon as they were both legal, Tolliver and Harper teamed back up to start a business making a living off Harper’s ill-gotten ability. With Tolliver acting as her agent and bodyguard, Harper travels the country working mainly for law-enforcement agencies locating people who are missing, presumed dead.
GRAVE SIGHT
In 2011 Dynamite Entertainment adapted the first Harper Connelly novel, Grave Sight, as a graphic novel in 3 parts, which were later collected as a hard-back graphic novel.
Harper & Tolliver have been hired to come to Sarne, Arkansas, to search for missing teen Del Teague. Finding his body very quickly and learning that the missing teenager did not die by accident nor did her commit suicide, Harper & Tolliver are drawn into the police case and the town’s political situation as the mystery of what happened to Del and his low-rent girlfriend Teeny. As they finally get to leave town Teeny’s mother recovering alcoholic, born-again Christian, Helen, asks them to visit and tell her what Harper sensed about her daughter’s death. She would be dead by dark, murdered (maybe?) by the same person who killed her younger daughter.
Again, held-up in their progress to their next job, Harper & Tolliver are asked to stay and answer questions (be investigated) by the Arkansas state police as they investigate this third murder in the small Ozark town. While they wait in the motel a local deputy asks Harper on a dateâbut he has ulterior motives. Yes, he’s attracted to her, but he is also intrigued by her ability and wants to know if she can tell him how his late wife died. Murder again.
About this time, Del’s little sister develops a crush on Tolliver, Tolliver gets arrested on a bogus charge for a warrant out of state that was cleared from his record as a ploy to keep them in town, and some local teens decide that Harper & Tolliver should leave town (even though they can’t). Harper is nearly assaulted by three local teens, then attacked at her motel. Then she goes on a date with the deputy, Tolliver gets out of jail, they leave town as fast as they can, but are called back before they get far enough and discover/reveal the identity of the killer(s?) and the first plot circle in this series is resolved.