Definitely Dead recap

Sookie meets Quinn, a weretiger who officiates supernatural ceremonies, just as she learns she has inherited the New Orleans estate of her cousin Hadley, who became a vampire and the lover of Sophie-Anne Leclerq, Queen of Louisiana, before dying. Clearing out the apartment, Sookie is attacked by a newly risen vampire hidden there, and befriends the landlady, a witch named Amelia Broadway, whose reconstruction of the past reveals that Hadley made the young werewolf Jake Purifoy into a vampire and stole a diamond bracelet belonging to the Queen. That theft has given the Queen's new husband, Peter Threadgill of Arkansas, the excuse he wants for a war. Debbie Pelt's sister has Sookie abducted and interrogated about the disappearance, and Sookie is rescued. At the Queen's compound the quarrel between Sophie-Anne and Threadgill turns into a battle; Sookie is injured, Bill is nearly destroyed shielding her, and Sophie-Anne kills her husband. Afterward Sookie learns that Bill originally came to Bon Temps under the Queen's orders, to seduce a telepath Hadley had told her about. She ends things with Bill permanently, takes up with Quinn, and brings Amelia home as her tenant.

Sookie Stackhouse is a telepathic waitress at Merlotte's bar in Bon Temps, Louisiana, in a world where vampires live openly and shapeshifters do not. Her grandmother was murdered by a man hunting Sookie; her boss Sam Merlotte is a shifter; her brother Jason was kidnapped and bitten and is now a werepanther. Her relationship with the vampire Bill Compton ended after he planned to leave her for the vampire who made him, and then nearly killed her while starving during his own rescue in Mississippi. She killed his maker with a stake. Eric Northman, the thousand-year-old vampire sheriff of the area, has wanted her for years; while cursed with amnesia he lived in her house and they became lovers, and he has since recovered both his memory and the knowledge that Sookie shot Debbie Pelt dead in her kitchen and hid the body with his help. Debbie's family has been investigating that disappearance ever since. Sookie's house was burned by a vampire assassin and rebuilt with supernatural money; a sniper who hunted shapeshifters was stopped; and the Shreveport werewolf pack passed to a new leader in a contest that cost Sookie her friendship with Alcide Herveaux. She has also learned that she has an unexplained protector, a woman named Claudine who is neither vampire nor shifter.

Sookie goes out to Hotshot for a werepanther ceremony involving her brother Jason and Crystal Norris. The rite is conducted by an outsider brought in as a neutral party: Quinn, a bald, purple-eyed man who organizes ceremonies for supernatural communities across the country and who is plainly interested in Sookie. The evening ends in violence when the gathering is attacked, and Sookie sees Quinn fight. Back home, she is visited by Mr. Cataliades, a lawyer who is not human and who handles the legal business of Louisiana's supernatural world. He brings the estate of Sookie's cousin Hadley Delahoussaye, who ran away to New Orleans as a teenager, became a vampire, rose to be the favorite of the vampire Queen of Louisiana, and has recently met her final death. Sookie is Hadley's next of kin, which makes the apartment in New Orleans, and everything in it, hers to deal with.

Sookie's life in Bon Temps carries on around the inheritance: shifts at Merlotte's, a rebuilt house she is still getting used to, and Bill Compton across the cemetery being available and unwanted. Eric Northman, who now remembers everything about the weeks he spent under a curse in her house, presses his own interest in her, and neither of them will say plainly what they want. Quinn comes back to Bon Temps and asks Sookie out, and their first date is interrupted by an attack that makes clear somebody is following her. The New Orleans trip cannot be put off much longer, and both the vampires of Louisiana and Sookie's own instinct tell her that Hadley's apartment holds more than furniture.

In New Orleans, Sookie meets Amelia Broadway, the young witch who owns the building and rented Hadley the upstairs apartment. Amelia is talkative, confident, and privately shamed by an experiment that turned a fellow witch into a cat she cannot change back. Amelia has kept the apartment sealed since Hadley's death and offers to help. Sorting through her cousin's belongings, Sookie is attacked by a vampire who has been lying in the apartment and who rises hungry and disoriented: Jake Purifoy, a young werewolf who had worked security for the New Orleans vampires and vanished around the time Hadley died. He is now a vampire, which is not a thing werewolves forgive, and he gets away.

Amelia performs an ectoplasmic reconstruction in the apartment, replaying the events of the night in question as ghostly figures. It shows that Hadley found Jake Purifoy mauled and dying, and made him a vampire to save him, an act that broke the vampires' rules and the Weres' worst taboo at once. Sookie is then presented to Sophie-Anne Leclerq, the Queen of Louisiana: a woman who looks like a well-dressed teenager and has been a vampire for over a thousand years, and who was Hadley's lover. The Queen has recently married Peter Threadgill, the King of Arkansas, in a political alliance, and the marriage has soured. Threadgill is looking for an insult he can use, and he has found one, because a diamond bracelet he gave his wife has gone missing, and it was Hadley who took it.

Sookie is abducted on her way out of the city. Sandra Pelt, Debbie's younger sister, has hired supernatural muscle and a psychic to get the truth out of her about the night Debbie vanished, and Sookie is held, questioned and threatened with worse. She is rescued, and the Pelt family's formal investigation is eventually closed with Debbie declared gone, though Sandra accepts nothing. Sookie's own part in the killing stays buried. Meanwhile the quarrel between the Queen and her husband is moving toward open war, and Sookie, as Hadley's heir and a human whose mind-reading the Queen values, is required to be present at the Queen's compound when Threadgill comes.

The confrontation at the Queen's headquarters becomes a battle. Threadgill's people attack under cover of a formal occasion, the Queen's household fights back, and humans present are simply in the way. Sookie is badly hurt. Bill Compton is nearly destroyed shielding her from the worst of it, and Eric and the Queen's people fight through the building. Sophie-Anne Leclerq kills Peter Threadgill herself, ending both the marriage and the war, and keeps her throne and Arkansas with it. The missing bracelet's history is now plain, and so is Hadley's: she stole it, she made a vampire without permission, and she died out of the consequences.

In the aftermath Sookie is told the one thing nobody had ever intended her to hear. Hadley, wanting to be interesting to her queen, mentioned that her cousin in Bon Temps could read minds. Sophie-Anne sent Bill Compton to that town to make himself part of Sookie's life, secure her loyalty and hand her to Louisiana. His arrival at Merlotte's, the courtship, the whole beginning of Sookie's life among vampires, was an assignment. Bill does not deny it. Sookie ends the relationship for good, in a way that leaves nothing to come back to, and it costs her more than the injuries did. She goes home to Bon Temps with Amelia Broadway as a tenant in the upstairs of her rebuilt house, and with Amelia's cat. Jake Purifoy is taken in by the vampires who now have to answer for him. Sookie starts seeing Quinn openly, and, as Hadley's heir and the Queen's known telepath, she is now a person the vampire hierarchy of Louisiana expects to be able to call on.

Peter Threadgill's quarrel with his wife ends in open fighting at the Queen's headquarters in New Orleans. Sookie is caught in it, is badly hurt, and survives; Bill is nearly destroyed protecting her; and Sophie-Anne Leclerq kills her husband herself and keeps her throne. The mystery of Hadley's last months is closed: Hadley made Jake Purifoy into a vampire to save his life after he was mauled, an act that was both a crime among the Weres and a disaster for her standing with the Queen, and she stole the diamond bracelet that gave Threadgill his pretext for war. Jake, unwilling and resentful, is taken in by the vampires. The Pelt family's private investigation ends with the Pelts formally accepting that Debbie is gone, though Sandra Pelt does not accept anything, and Sookie's part in it stays hidden. Sookie ends the book with two permanent changes. Amelia Broadway comes home with her to Bon Temps as a tenant, bringing her cat, and becomes a friend and a live-in witch. And Sookie finally learns why Bill Compton came back to Bon Temps at all: Hadley told the Queen that her cousin could read minds, and Bill was sent to seduce Sookie and secure her for Louisiana. Everything that followed grew out of an assignment. Sookie throws him out of her life for good, and starts seeing Quinn.