Living Dead in Dallas recap

Sookie Stackhouse's cook Lafayette is found murdered in a detective's car, and a creature in the woods, a maenad called Callisto, claws her half to death for a message to the local vampires. Once she is healed, Eric Northman hires her telepathy out to the vampires of Dallas, who need to know what became of a missing nest member. In Dallas she meets Barry, another telepath, and traces the missing vampire to the Fellowship of the Sun, an anti-vampire church. Infiltrating it, she is captured and imprisoned in its basement, where she discovers that the human escort sent with her has been informing on the vampires all along. She escapes with the help of a shapeshifter spy and a suicidal ancient vampire named Godfrey, who dies at sunrise as he had planned, and the Dallas nest breaks the Fellowship's plans. Back home, Sookie attends the private party where Lafayette's killers are found, and the maenad arrives and kills them in a frenzy. The vampires pay their tribute and the maenad leaves. Sookie is left paid, hurt, and much clearer about the price of belonging to vampires.

Sookie Stackhouse is a waitress at Merlotte's bar in the small Louisiana town of Bon Temps. She has been telepathic all her life, which is why the town thinks her strange and why she has never had a normal relationship. Vampires revealed their existence publicly a few years ago, and Sookie fell in love with Bill Compton, a Civil War veteran turned vampire who came home to claim his family's house across the cemetery from hers. Their courtship ran alongside a string of murders of local women who had slept with vampires; Sookie's grandmother, who raised her, was killed in Sookie's place, and Sookie herself was nearly murdered before she worked out that the killer was a familiar face in town. She survived through vampire blood, which has left her stronger and more attractive than she was. She also learned that the world holds more than vampires: her boss Sam Merlotte is a shapeshifter. Through Bill she met the vampires of Shreveport, above all Eric Northman, who is over a thousand years old, rules the vampires of the area, and now knows exactly what Sookie's mind can do. He has made it clear that a useful human in his territory is a resource he expects to use.

Sookie's world has settled into an uneasy routine: she waits tables at Merlotte's, dates Bill, and lets her boss Sam treat her a little more openly now that she knows what he is. That routine breaks when Lafayette Reynold, the bar's cook, is found dead in the back seat of Detective Andy Bellefleur's car in the Merlotte's parking lot. Andy, drunk the night before and unable to account for himself, is the obvious suspect and asks Sookie to listen in on the people around him. Before that goes anywhere, Sookie is attacked in the woods by something she has no name for: a beautiful, filthy woman who tears her back open with claws and leaves her poisoned by a wound no hospital can treat. Bill gets her to help, and Eric Northman brings in Dr. Ludwig, a tiny non-human physician, who cuts and drains the poison out of her. The attacker, Sookie learns, was a maenad named Callisto, a creature out of Greek myth who feeds on madness, and the injury was not personal: it was a message demanding tribute from the vampires who use her territory.

With Sookie recovered, Eric collects on her usefulness by hiring her out to the vampires of Dallas, for a fee paid to him. Bill goes with her as her escort and, officially, her protection. In Dallas she meets Barry, a bellman at the vampire-friendly hotel who is a telepath like her and terrified of being noticed, the first person she has ever met who shares her gift. Stan Davis, who leads the Dallas nest, explains the job: a vampire named Farrell went missing from a bar and nobody knows who took him. Sookie reads the humans who work at the bar and picks up a lead pointing to the Fellowship of the Sun, an anti-vampire church with a large Dallas campus. To get inside, she goes in posing as a visitor with Hugo Ayres, the human partner of the vampire Isabel Edwards, on the argument that a couple will attract less suspicion than a woman alone.

Inside the Fellowship, Sookie meets Steve and Sarah Newlin, who are warm, smiling and immovably certain that vampires are an abomination. The tour turns into a trap: Sookie and Hugo are taken and locked in the church basement, and reading Hugo's mind, Sookie learns he has been feeding the Fellowship information about the Dallas vampires for some time, out of resentment at his place in Isabel's life. In the cells below the church she finds Farrell, and also Godfrey, an ancient vampire who is there voluntarily. Sickened by centuries of preying on children, Godfrey has agreed to be burned alive at sunrise in front of the congregation as penance, and the Fellowship intends to make a spectacle of it. Sookie is then attacked by Gabe, the Fellowship enforcer who runs the basement; Godfrey kills him. Godfrey lets Sookie go, and she gets out of the building with the help of Luna Garza, a shapeshifter who has been spying on the church from inside.

Sookie escapes the church campus and is reunited with the Dallas vampires. Farrell is freed and the Fellowship's plans collapse, though the Newlins themselves get away. At dawn Godfrey keeps his own appointment and burns in the sunlight as he intended, with Sookie the only witness who came for his sake rather than the spectacle. Hugo's betrayal is handed over to Isabel and Stan, and the vampires' idea of justice is not one Sookie can watch. The Dallas vampires settle accounts with the Fellowship in their own way. Bill, starved and shaken after the events at the church, drinks from Sookie roughly and without asking, which frightens her badly and puts a crack in the relationship that does not close. Paid and battered, the two of them fly home to Louisiana with Sookie's opinion of vampire hospitality permanently lowered.

Back in Bon Temps, Lafayette's murder is still unsolved and Callisto is still in the parish woods, drawing violence toward herself. Sookie learns that Lafayette had been going to private parties held by respectable local people, sex parties his neighbors would be ruined by, and that he had let it be known he could name names. To find his killers, Sookie goes to one such party at a lake house, and reads the guests from the inside. She identifies the couple who killed him and dumped his body, and before anything can be done about it, Callisto arrives. The maenad turns the party into a slaughter, driving the guests into a killing frenzy, and several of them, including Lafayette's murderers, die in it. Sookie survives because she is pulled out of the house, and the maenad, having taken what she wanted, is not interested in her.

The aftermath is tidied by the people who tidy such things: the deaths at the lake house are made to look like something the parish can accept, and Lafayette's murder is closed without Andy Bellefleur going to jail for it. Eric and Bill deliver the tribute Callisto demanded for her territory, and the maenad leaves the parish satisfied, taking her appetite for madness somewhere else. Sookie ends the book paid for her work in Dallas and comprehensively disillusioned by it. She has been rented out, taken hostage, nearly raped, and drunk from without her consent, and she has seen how completely Bill's obligations to older and stronger vampires outrank his obligations to her. She does not end the relationship, but she puts distance into it and tells him why. Eric Northman, meanwhile, has watched all of it and is less inclined than ever to leave her alone.

Two separate threats are settled. In Bon Temps, Sookie goes to a private party at a lake house to find out who killed Lafayette, and learns that he had been attending these secret sex parties with respectable local people and had made the mistake of letting them know he could talk. Callisto the maenad arrives at the party and drives everyone present into a frenzy; several of the party-goers die in the madness, including those responsible for Lafayette's death, and Sookie survives only because she is pulled clear. The maenad's claim on the territory is finally settled when the vampires deliver the tribute she demanded, and she moves on out of the parish. In Dallas the Fellowship of the Sun has been badly damaged: their hostage is freed, Godfrey dies at sunrise as he intended, and the church's leadership is exposed and scattered, though Steve and Sarah Newlin themselves get away and the Fellowship as a movement is not finished. Sookie ends the book paid, injured and angry. She has been lent out like property, drunk from without her consent, and made to see how little of Bill's loyalty is hers when his own kind command him. She does not leave him, but she tells him plainly that she needs distance, and Eric Northman's interest in her has only grown.