Definitely Dead characters

Appears from the start

A telepathic waitress at Merlotte's bar in Bon Temps, Louisiana, whose house has been half rebuilt after an arson fire and whose private life is a wreck. She is single, wary of vampires, and carrying secrets that several dangerous parties would like to have out of her. She has recently been left as the only close relative of a cousin who died in New Orleans, which is about to take her a long way out of her own parish.

Appears from the start

Sookie's cousin on her mother's side, a few years older, who ran away from home as a teenager and vanished into New Orleans with a serious drug problem. Somewhere in those years she became a vampire and rose high in the vampire society of the city. She died shortly before the book opens, leaving Sookie as her next of kin and an apartment full of things nobody has explained.

Appears from the start

A bald, purple-eyed man built like a heavyweight, who arrives to conduct a werepanther ceremony at Hotshot as a neutral outsider. He organizes and officiates rituals for supernatural communities all over the country, is unusually straightforward for someone in that trade, and takes an immediate and undisguised interest in Sookie.

Appears from the start

Sookie's brother, a road crew supervisor and a bitten werepanther, now deep in the affairs of the Hotshot community and involved with Crystal Norris.

Appears from the start

A young werepanther from Hotshot and Jason's girlfriend, caught between her insular family and the outsider she has attached herself to.

First appears in chapter 2

Sookie's boss at Merlotte's and a shapeshifter, still the person in Bon Temps most reliably on her side and least happy about the company she keeps.

First appears in chapter 2

Sookie's former lover, the vampire who lives across the cemetery. He is still in Bon Temps, still available whenever she is threatened, and still hoping she will change her mind about him.

First appears in chapter 3

A lawyer of unusual size and appetite who handles the legal affairs of the supernatural world in Louisiana. He is not human and does not pretend to be, and he arrives to settle the estate of Sookie's cousin with the news that Sookie has inherited it.

First appears in chapter 4

The thousand-year-old sheriff of the vampires of northern Louisiana. He remembers everything about the weeks he spent under a curse in Sookie's house, including what she did there, and he is now openly angling for a claim on her, both as a telepath and as a woman.

First appears in chapter 4

Eric's second at Fangtasia, dry, blunt and a good deal fonder of Sookie than she is of most vampires.

First appears in chapter 9

A young New Orleans witch who owns the building where Sookie's cousin lived and rented her the upstairs apartment. Confident, talkative and better at magic than her judgement warrants, she is willing to help Sookie find out what happened in that apartment, partly out of guilt over a spell of her own that went badly wrong.

First appears in chapter 9

A black-and-white cat living in Amelia Broadway's house, treated by her with an apologetic tenderness she will not explain to strangers. He was a witch of her acquaintance until one of her experiments went wrong, and she has not been able to change him back.

First appears in chapter 10

A young werewolf who worked security for the New Orleans vampires and disappeared shortly before Sookie's cousin died. He is found in the apartment Sookie has inherited, and he is no longer a werewolf.

First appears in chapter 13

The vampire Queen of Louisiana, who rules from a compound in New Orleans. She looks like a teenage girl in expensive clothes and has been a vampire for more than a thousand years. Sookie's cousin was her lover and her favorite, and the Queen is a good deal more interested in Sookie than mere condolences would explain.

First appears in chapter 13

The Queen of Louisiana's child, bodyguard and enforcer, a vampire with the face of a boy and no discernible interest in anything but her. He is entirely without warmth toward humans and measures everyone he meets by what they can do for his queen.

First appears in chapter 14

The vampire King of Arkansas, recently married to Sophie-Anne Leclerq in a political alliance neither of them wanted for its own sake. He is proud, aggrieved, and looking for a formal insult he can use against his wife.

First appears in chapter 16

Debbie Pelt's younger sister, a shapeshifter, who has never accepted that her sister simply disappeared. Violent and single-minded where the rest of her family is merely persistent, she is prepared to hire whoever is necessary to get an answer out of Sookie.