Dead to the World recap

Driving home on New Year's Eve, Sookie finds Eric Northman running down a dark road half naked with no memory of who he is, cursed by a coven of witches who are also werewolves and who want a share of his businesses. Pam pays Sookie to hide him at her house, where an unguarded and affectionate Eric becomes her lover. At the same time Sookie's brother Jason vanishes from his home, and the trail leads toward the closed werepanther community of Hotshot. Sookie's telepathy helps a coalition of vampires, werewolves and local Wiccans find and destroy the coven, killing Hallow Stonebrook's brother and taking Hallow alive to lift the curse. On the same night, Debbie Pelt breaks into Sookie's house to kill her, wounds Eric, and is shot dead by Sookie; Eric makes the body disappear. When the curse breaks, Eric returns to himself with no memory of any of it, including the killing and the weeks with Sookie. Jason is found alive but bitten, and will become a werepanther at the next full moon.

Sookie Stackhouse is a telepathic waitress at Merlotte's bar in Bon Temps, Louisiana, in a world where vampires live openly among humans. Her grandmother was murdered by a killer who was really hunting Sookie, and Sookie herself has twice been nearly killed for vampire business. Her boss Sam Merlotte is a shapeshifter; the parish has been visited by a maenad; and she has been held prisoner by the anti-vampire Fellowship of the Sun in Dallas. Her relationship with Bill Compton, the vampire who came home to Bon Temps, is over: he had been planning to leave her for Lorena, the vampire who made him, before he was kidnapped and tortured in Mississippi, and when Sookie rescued him he nearly killed her while out of his mind with hunger. She killed Lorena herself. She also came away with the database of vampires Bill had been compiling for the Queen of Louisiana, which she keeps hidden as leverage. All of this is watched over by Eric Northman, the thousand-year-old Norse vampire who rules the area from his Shreveport bar and who wants Sookie for reasons he has never bothered to disguise. In Jackson she met the werewolf Alcide Herveaux, whose ex-lover Debbie Pelt tried to have her killed and was cast out of decent society for it.

Sookie works New Year's Eve at Merlotte's, newly single and determined to be dull for a while. Bill leaves the country on research of his own, which suits her. Driving home in the early hours she nearly hits a man running down the road in the cold: Eric Northman, barefoot, half dressed, and with no memory of anything except that he is a vampire. She takes him in. Pam and Chow arrive with the explanation. A coven has come to Shreveport demanding a cut of the vampires' businesses, and its witches are not ordinary practitioners: they are werewolves who drink vampire blood, which makes their magic strong enough to strip a thousand-year-old sheriff of his mind and set him wandering. Until the coven can be found and the curse broken, Eric has to be hidden somewhere no vampire would think to look, and Pam offers Sookie money to keep him at her house. Sookie takes the job.

Living with Eric is nothing like knowing him. Without a millennium of scheming he is warm, direct, easily hurt and completely dependent on her, and Sookie finds herself protecting him. Then her brother Jason vanishes. His truck is at his house, the door is open, and there is blood on the dock over the pond behind it. The police can do nothing with it. Sookie learns that Jason had been seeing Crystal Norris, a young woman from Hotshot, an isolated crossroads community whose families never marry outsiders, and that Crystal's account of the night is a lie. Sookie goes to Hotshot herself and finds a community of werepanthers, headed by Calvin Norris, who offers his people's help in the search and makes plain that he would like Sookie for himself. Nobody in Hotshot will say what happened to her brother.

Sookie is pulled in two directions: hunting for Jason and being paid to hide Eric while the vampires hunt the coven. Fangtasia's people are outmatched and know it, and the coven has begun killing. To find Hallow Stonebrook and her brother Mark, the vampires make an alliance with the Shreveport werewolf pack under Colonel Flood, with Alcide Herveaux among them, and with a circle of local Wiccans who want nothing to do with either side but are more afraid of Hallow. Sookie's telepathy is what makes the alliance work, since she can read the human minds around the coven's operation. She and Eric become lovers during the days he is hidden with her, an intimacy neither of them could have had otherwise, and she is clear-eyed that it will not survive the return of his memory.

The coalition locates the coven's hideout and attacks. The fight is bloody and one-sided in both directions by turns, since the witches are werewolves with vampire blood in them, and both the pack and the vampires take losses. Sookie is in the middle of it and is guarded by a tall, striking woman who appears from nowhere, introduces herself as Claudine, says she is there to look after Sookie, and refuses to explain what she is beyond being neither vampire nor shifter. Mark Stonebrook is killed. Hallow is taken alive rather than destroyed, because she is the only one who can undo what she did to Eric, and the vampires' methods for persuading her are not ones Sookie wants described to her.

That same night, Debbie Pelt lets herself into Sookie's house with a rifle. Cast out by Alcide and disgraced in front of everyone she cares about, she blames Sookie and has come to finish it. She fires, and Eric puts himself between them and takes the bullet. Sookie kills her with a shotgun. Eric, still without his memory but entirely competent, disposes of the body and Debbie's truck so thoroughly that they will never be found, and the two of them agree that nobody else will ever know. Sookie is left with a death on her conscience and no one she can tell. Then Hallow is made to lift the curse, and Eric's thousand years come back to him.

Eric wakes as himself and remembers nothing of the weeks he spent in Sookie's house: not their nights together, not the alliance, not Debbie Pelt bleeding on her kitchen floor. He returns to Shreveport as the sheriff he always was, pays Sookie generously for hiding him, and is left plainly aware that something happened that she will not discuss. Sookie decides not to tell him. Jason is found alive, dumped near his own house after weeks of being held in a shed and bitten repeatedly by a werepanther; whoever took him is still unidentified, and Jason will change at the next full moon whether he chooses to or not, without the strength or the standing of a panther born to it. Sookie ends the book with her brother permanently altered, a killing that only she remembers, and a private history with Eric Northman that he does not know he has.

The alliance of vampires, werewolves and local Wiccans destroys Hallow Stonebrook's coven in a running fight at their hideout. Mark Stonebrook is killed, Hallow is taken alive, and she is made to undo the spell she cast. Before that happens, Debbie Pelt lets herself into Sookie's house with a rifle. She shoots at Sookie and hits Eric, who puts himself in the way, and Sookie kills her with a shotgun. Eric disposes of the body and the truck so completely that no one will ever find them, and the two of them agree to say nothing. Then the curse is broken. Eric wakes as himself, with his thousand years and his calculation restored, and remembers nothing at all of the weeks he spent in Sookie's house: not their nights together, not the fighting, and not Debbie Pelt. He goes back to Shreveport as the sheriff he was, pays Sookie what he owes her, and is baffled by whatever it is she will not say. Jason is found alive, dumped near his own house after being held and bitten repeatedly by a werepanther, and he will change at the next full moon whether he wants to or not; who took him is still unknown. Sookie is left with a brother turning into something he did not choose, a killing nobody knows about but her, and a memory of Eric that only she carries.