DEAD AND GONE. Charlaine Harris. Ace. 320 pages. $25.95.

For Sookie Stackhouse fans, it's been a long year. Last September brought our Southern-fried heroine to the small screen in the HBO series True Blood. But even with the unexpected twists of the show, that plot was a little 2001 for anybody who has been devouring Charlaine Harris' book series since its inception.

A year after the last installment of the Southern Vampire Series, book No. 9 hits bookstores. On Sunday, HBO started season two of True Blood with a set of characters that may turn out to be even more of a departure from Harris' creation.

Luckily for fans, Dead and Gone deposits readers in familiar territory. The plot takes up where we left our telepathic barmaid: In a world of supernatural creatures that mingles with the regular Wal-Mart shoppers of Bon Temps, the northern Louisiana town where Sookie lives.

The witches are still camped out in Sookie's house. The fairies remain mysterious, and the hunky vampires can't seem to keep their fangs off her.

As Dead and Gone opens, werewolves have decided to follow the vampires' lead and announce their presence to the human world. Alternative lifestyles, it seems, cannot bear to stay underground when there are supernatural reality TV shows to develop.

Coming out, though, creates some trouble in Bon Temps, and the regular world seems interested in Sookie's special talents. All this free-to-be-you-and-me attitude leaves only the fairies to wreak havoc under the radar.

Sookie must uncover the threats, beat back the danger and find love, perhaps in all the wrong places.

Of course, that is why we come back to the series year after year: To root for Sookie. She's the oddball who lurks in us all.

To the regular world she is chubby, weird and underemployed (though Anna Paquin, who plays Sookie on the HBO series, cannot be said to be all of those things). In Harris' fantasy world, Sookie is an irresistible princess. And as Sookie and every modern princess with a head on her shoulders knows, only she can get the job done right, friends and family disappoint as often as they deliver, and sometimes the prince turns out to be a frog.

Or a vampire.

Tara Dooley reviewed this book for The Houston Chronicle.

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