Review: Nice Girls Don't Date Dead Men by Molly Harper

Recently, it seems my book choices have been leaning towards the supernatural or otherworldly. Vampires, werewolves, angels, zombies, ghosts, they've all made appearances in my book choices of late. So, Molly Harper's Nice Girls Don't Date Dead Men fit in very well with this theme.

You would think that a newly-turned vampire could only experience a certain number of problems, like where to find the next feed or where her day time resting place should be, but Harper has created such scenarios that poor Jane Jameson is up to her preternatural eyeballs in difficulties.

Jane was once a simple girl, dreaming of "marrying Mark-Paul Gosselaar from Saved by the Bell." Now, knee deep as maid of honour at her best friends' Titanic themed wedding, she has a loved-crazed she-wolf bride to contend with. She has also just lost her most recent step-grandfather to an unfortunate misunderstanding of "dosage on his 'little blue tablets' " he had taken to celebrate their anniversary. It's beginning to look like her Grandmother is single-handedly, albeit accidentally, doing away with all of the octogenarian males in Half Moon Hollow, Kentucky. Not one to be alone for long, Grandma brings a date to the funeral, but Jane suspects there's something not quite right with Wilbur. Much fun ensues as Jane works her way through these issues and more.

I have to admit, I was pretty much expecting it to be similar in feel to Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire Series but I was pleasantly surprised to find this wasn't entirely the case. Harper writes with wit, sarcasm, and is just plain silly at times, which I found refreshing. While it wasn't the most face paced story, her use of pop-culture references and self-deprecating humour (from the main character's point of view) made it a lot of fun for me to read. It has always been my assumption that to be successfully funny you must first be very smart and I get the sense that this holds true for Molly Harper.

I will have to go back now and read the first book in the series, Nice Girls Don't Have Fangs, and anxiously await the publication of the next installment in the series, Nice Girls Don't Live Forever, due out December 29, 2009.

To read an excerpt from the book click here