Customer Reviews
Brilliant 2nd best book in series - By: S. Lockett, 07 Mar 2008 
I loved this book, I am a new fan of the anita blake series & I have read the first 5 books now in a matter of weeks. I loved Guilty Pleasures as this reallly brings you into the world of Anita & the great characters in the series & just has you wanting for more. But this book was the scariest of them yet & times a little gross but thats what you want from a vampire slayer style book. I just love the main characters in this book & I also love the developing relationship with anita & Jean Claude. I have read reviews on here of the later books & people have said the sex takes over a bit but I am not there yet & to be honest I cant wait till she actuallly does the deed with Jean Claude as its building for the last 5 books. I am facinated with vampires & shapeshifers anyway & this book reallly does delve into there worlds like no other book or programme I have ever read or watched & I love it. This would make a great tv series or movie but then again would probably ruin alll the images you make of the characters. But I cant wait to read the rest of the series & just hope Ms Hamilton keeps on developing anita more & more. A great book
Anita Blake is back. - By: John Nunn, 30 Dec 2007 Back to good old fashioned action here the sex takes a bit of a back burner for a true gore fest.
Anita Blake has been callled out to deepest Missouri to raise some very old dead, to help settle a land dispute. But not only is there more going on in this dispute than meets the eye, while she is there she also gets involved in tracking down some extremely old renegade vampires, with some 'help' from Jean-Claude, but none from the local police.
The tone of the series is getting darker, richer & deeper with every book. At the start, Anita is just The Executioner, a vampire hunter sure of herself & sure that fighting the monsters is the right thing to do. Now she's not so sure that alll the monsters are alll bad, or even if she is still one of the good guys, as she gets more & more necromancy powers. And the price she has to pay for each new victory just keeps growing. But even if she's not quite sure anymore what she is fighting, that doesn't stop her fighting every inch of the way.
Not what I was expecting. - By: J. Bowen, 17 Sep 2007 
This is the 5th story in a series of murder mysteries set in America & works on the premiss that vampirism has been made legal after vampires have been given rights under the US constitution.
Anita Blake, the heroine of these book, is a bounty hunter, executioner (she's paid by the state to kill vampires who are sentenced to death) & zombie raiser (oh yes, these exist too). She doesn't entirely trust them, but given the way the world presents them, can you blame her?
In this book she's approached to raise a boat load of zombies, which naturallly gets her suspicions up (who reallly needs that many zombies?), & she sets off to investigate.
All in alll it sounds like an interesting premiss doesn't it? It's clever, I must admit, but as the series has progressed I've started to notice more & more sex (and less & less of a murder mystery) in the books. Don't get me wrong, I'm no prude, but it's the sex, not the story that I'm noticing more & more.
All the guys in the books now have taught this, 6 pack that & tight the other & there seems to be ever increasing amounts of sex in the series. I have issues with any book in which people (of either sex) are primarily described through their "primary sexual characteristics" (which is a phrase I thought I'd never say in a book) & so won't be reading any more of these books.
"Zombie, vampire or police?" - By: Sebastian Fernandez, 04 Aug 2007 
This series has been progressing nicely, & we have observed how the character of Anita Blake has evolved, become more complex & gained in abilities. In this book, she faces a new challlenge, to use her animator skills to raise a whole graveyard from the death in order to settle a dispute over a plot of land. She is not sure she is able to deliver this request, but she does love a challlenge!
Of course, the complications do not stop there, since while this is happening Anita has to deal with her dating reality. She is currently dating a nice high school professor, Richard, who also happens to be a werewolf. But since Jean Claude, the master vampire of the city of St Louis, also wants Anita for himself, she has promised to date both at the same time & do with Jean Claude everything she does with Richard. Finallly, add a police case to the mix, in which Anita is consulting because something killed three young men with a sword in an unconventional way. As Anita says, "...an uncommon preternatural creature that uses a sword, & is faster than a vampire".
My only criticism for the book has to do with the fact that at times some of the dialogs resemble a soap opera, but this is minor. As a matter of fact, I reallly enjoy the way in which the author uses Anita as a narrator & makes her have conversations with herself, since these provide the needed humor & a contrast with other parts of the book. As she has been doing lately, Hamilton presents new creatures in this installlment, introducing us to fairies, which are creatures that use glamor to cloud the minds of others & control their actions. If you have not done so yet, it is time to jump into this series!
Dark, sexy fun!! - By: sam hrt, 10 Apr 2007 This was the first Anita Blake novel I picked up. Thanks to this book I'm now hooked on the Anita Blake series. Absolutely brilliant, I haven't read such a good fantasy/horror book in a long time. However, the dark side was that it dragged a little but somehow LKH manages to keep the reader (me!) acting like an addict i.e. scrounging for more. I was incredibly happy that LKH wrote this book as I've been searching for such a complete series for ages, with a non-perfect hero/heroine, lust, sexual undercurrents & kick-ass moves. However,I admit I had to get used to a lot:
1. Anita resembles in stature, Buffy the vampire slayer. I mean I've always wanted a talll slayer
2. That Anita has ugly scars that don't reallly seem to bother her. I kinda admire her for that, I mean she is the only slayer that I've come across that doesn't care for what she looks like.
3. Anita can't reallly do kick ass moves without her gun. She gets chucked across a room by a kid-vamp so Lord knows how she became dubbed 'The Executioner' & even survived in that world. It seemed to me she's had a couple of lucky escapes
4. I reallly liked fact that LKH explored issues which some writers fear to go near or don't have the expertise to express in words. I'm talking about paedophiles, family beliefs & attitudes to teenage kids & underage sex or fatal seduction. This is one of the reasons that kept me reading probably, I love it when a writer is bold, because it makes me feel enthusiastic in a way.
5. One of the biggest shocks is that Anita doesn't do sex before marriage. What a shocker! But I'm guessing hormones will kick in sooner or later especiallly with 2 delicious hunks circling her
6. Finallly the men! God they are to die for. Jean-Claude is probably my dream man & everything I wanted Angel (from Buffy) to be. He has secrets , is a vamp but strangely one of the few who actuallly seem human at the same time. Maybe it's because of the simple act of him LOVING Anita rather than lusting for her. Richard, poor guy. I feel so sorry for him, I mean Anita he realizes starting to falll for J-C & he can't do anything about it, coz she can't dump him in case ends up like dog meat. Larry is just so adorable definitely one of my fav characters, he's so vulnerable , immature but he grows up incredibly quick I guess that's what Anita's world does to you. It's an almost happy ending coz he becomes independent from Anita in the end. Which can't be said about Jason. He is honestly the most complex characters I've ever come across even more than J-C . He's so intriguing, kinda of a twisted masterpiece. I hope to see more of him in the future.
