Well-plotted second entry in the latest Charlaine Harris series. This time, Lizbeth is with a new crew that is ambushed. Eli shows up and is involved in the same quest she was hired to take part in.

As this mission is under way, Harris uses her alternative history setting to make good points about racism, religion and relationships without doing any preaching or overreaching within the parameters of her set-up.

Looking forward to the third and fourth books before the fifth is published in early September. ( )

This second book in the Gunnie Rose series finds Lizbeth working with a new crew and bringing a crate into Dixie. When their train car is bombed and attacked by people who want the case, Lizbeth manages to save it. However, one of the crew is dead and the rest including Lizbeth are injured.

The case is stolen and the crew member guarding it has his throat cut. Lizbeth doesn't know what to do since only the leader knew who their client was but the reappearance of Eli Savarov gives her a direction to follow.

Eli was sent on this mission because he is under suspicion in the NRE. The fact that his father was a traitor to the tsar makes all of the rest of the family look suspicious. Eli is also searching for the missing crate since the HRE had sent it to support the efforts of Negroes to get more independence.

Dixie has regressed since the United States broke up. Segregation is back in full force and the lot of Negroes is not good. Lizbeth knew this because her best friend Galillee had fled Dixie to Texoma after being raped by the white man who employed her family. Lizbeth wants to see Galilee's parents to let them know how she died and to show them a picture of Galillee's new grandchild.

Lizbeth also finds that the mores of Dixie don't approve of a single, independent woman dressed in denim trousers and carrying guns. She and Eli pose as husband and wife to try to get around this, but the grigori are not very popular in Dixie either.

This story is filled with action and intrigue. There are lots of plot twists and many characters of undetermined loyalties. All Lizbeth and Eli can do is trust in each other even though Lizbeth knows Eli isn't telling her everything.

I liked the way the relationship grew between Eli and Lizbeth. I also liked the realistic way Lizbeth looked at the relationship. She knew it couldn't last since their lives were in two very different places.

This is the second book in a four-book series. I'm eager to read the next for Lizbeth's further adventures. ( )

The Longer Fall by Charlaine Harris
Gunnie Rose series book 2. Alternate history. Should be read in series order.
Lisbeth Rose is hired to protect a crate without knowing what it contains. What was supposed to be easy, turns into a massacre as the crew is killed and crate is stolen and Lizzie finds a society in Dixie that’s volatile.

Gutsy and confident, Lizzie is swift on the draw and the Gunnie you want at your back. It’s a fast moving story that will keep you at the edge of your seat as each threat and gun battle has you breathless.

🎧 I listened to an audiobook version narrated by Eva Kaminsky. The performance was dead on with the suspense and horror of the massacre coming through clearly. Voice variations are well done and distinct. I listened to this at my preferred 1.3. ( )

Charlaine Harris' alternative America, where history diverged after Roosevelt’s assassination, is a fractured America that has lost land to its neighbours and has seen twelve of the original colonies ally with Britain. San Diego has become the home of the Holy Russian Empire (HRE) after the Tsar fled there with his army, his priests and his magicians in 1918.

This is an America where magic works and those with a talent for it seek training and employment in the HRE. This America is a violent, often lawless place where travel is dangerous and borders mark the places where attitudes and beliefs change and local laws back them up.

Charlaine Harris brings the world to life by showing it to us through the eyes of nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Rose a young woman who knows that the world she lives in is hard and unforgiving and likely to take her life if she lets it. Still, there’s no point in complaining about what you can’t change so she does what needs to be done, which in her case means working as a 'Gunnie' using her guns to kill anyone who tries to kill the clients she’s protecting.

I was introduced to Elizabeth Rose in the first book in the series, “An Easy Death”. An action-packed book with a huge body-count. The tone of the book was set by the title, An Easy Death is what Gunnies wish each other. It’s the best luck they can reasonably hope for.

'A Longer Fall' takes place a few months after the first book and sees Gunnie Rose with a new crew, protecting a chest that they have to deliver to a small town in Dixie. After the train she is on is attacked and the rest of her crew are either killed or injured and the chest is lost, Gunnie Rose finds herself having to stay in Dixie to find and retrieve the chest and kill whoever took it. She's aided in this by meeting up with Eli, the HRE Gregorie that she worked with in 'An Easy Death'. His mission overlaps with hers so he hires her to work with him to find the chest.

Based on what I remembered from 'An Easy Death', I'd expected 'A Longer Fall' to be another frantic, action-packed, high body-count adventure. It sort of was those things but it mostly wasn't. This was a calmer book focused on solving a mystery while trying not to attract attention in a town where everyone watches everyone else and Elizabeth Rose has to decide who she can trust and who she might have to kill. and surviving in a strange town It seemed to me that this was a calmer but more threatening book about Elizabeth Rose navigating her way through the complexities of a strange town and deciding who she could trust and who she might have to kill.

The town is strange not just because it's new to her but because Dixie separated from the rest of America in order to maintain its distinctive culture of genteel patriarchal misogyny, racism, segregation and religious intolerance.

At first, it was amusing to see Elizabeth Rose having to adjust to a culture where, for her to be treated with any courtesy, she must abandon her normal outfit of jeans and a sleeveless shirt, with a brace of handguns on her hips and a knife in her boot, in favour of demure dresses, soft shoes and a purse barely large enough to hold a gun; but bit by bit as the nature of the society revealed itself, I came to feel that Gunnie Rose's own culture, as brutal and unforgiving as it was, was stll a better choice than this claustrophobic town where hate and fear and mutual distrust, pulse beneath a surface civility that is more about enforcing compliance than granting polite respect.

I found that I enjoyed the slower pace of this book. Elizabeth Rose and Eli's search for the people who stole the chest was filled with day-to-day details of life in the town that gave the story a gritty reality.

For me, the best thing about the book was Elizabeth Rose herself. This story let her character shine through. We see her determination, her adherence to a personal code, her righteous anger at abuse, her pragmatic understanding of the limits of her relationships, her openness to friendship despite all the betrayals and lies and most of all her acceptance of responsibility for her own life and her refusal to be told how to live it.

A third Gunnie Rose book has already been published and a fourth comes out in November 2022. I'll be reading both of them. ( )

To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure I buy the underlying plot points when they are finally revealed; however, who cares? Not me! This book is great -- just as fast paced, world-full, character driven as the other, and I loved it. So glad to see Gunnie Rose again, and wondering how she will continue in the future. This episode takes place in Dixie, and I like seeing the world fleshed out, even as I despise Dixie as pictured. ( )