Author - Laurell K. Hamilton

Once again I had finished the current book in one of my favorite series by Patricia Briggs, And I find myself in the sci-fi / fantasy section of Barnes & Noble. My hungry eyes roam over the beautiful glossy covers, but nothing suddenly jumps out nor does it peek from behind the shelf and yell or whisper to me / at me "READ ME".I was in the vampire / shape shifter mood and didn't know what to try. Throwing caution to the wind I stop a male sales clerk that is nearby and ask for his help. Honestly I didn't expect him to know much about the genre, he's a guy right? Thankfully he didn't fit my self-righteous stereotype and knew a lot about it. I told him that my favorite of the group so far was Briggs and could he guide me in that direction. He offered up The Southern Vampire Mysteries with the warning that they were heavy into sex. Since I wasn't up to weighing myself down with that bandwagon yet, he suggested Hamilton and her Anita Blake mysteries

I went ahead and picked up the first book in the series.Guilty Pleasures. It was good, but didn't suck me in, ya' know. A year or so goes by and I eventually read the second in the series, The Laughing Corpse. Same feeling good, but not an all consuming need. Now a few more years have passed and I'm at my local used book store, searching for Inheritance by Paolini which was not in, and since it wasn't and I can't leave a bookstore without a book, I browse the vampire section. Yes, they have a section specifically for vampires. There many of the Anita Blake series sat. Oh, why not, I'll just pick up a couple of them, Circus of the Damned and Lunatic Cafe. Guess what, now I'm hooked. That trip was a week ago. I was back there today buying all of the series that was left there, and am planning a trip to other stores to find the missing few to my collection I do ask myself, why not check them out at the library. In the end, if I think that I will read the series again, I should own it. I will read it again, thus I need to own it.

Anita Blake, necromancer and vampire executioner, is the main character of Hamilton's best-selling novels. Blake works for Bert, the bully buzz cut greedy boos, raising the dead for money. Dealing with the dead is her special talent and being able to raise zombies is one way of using it. She chooses to kill chickens to accomplish this goal, but has been in situations where people have been died and their deaths have aided her too. Having to do so sets with her principles. Killing bad vampires is also a role she takes on. She does it both legally, with a court order since vampires are recognized as citizens, and illegally when one has gone rogue and come after her or her friends.She chooses the lesser of two evils to be the Master Vampire of the City (St. Louis, Missouri). Jean-Claude, the suave sexy charming vampire, becomes Master of the City and through repeated attacks of him Blake assists him in retaining that power. She also has a part-time job as a preternatural expert with the police, Dolph and Zebrowski of the Spook Squad. During her dealings with these men and the crimes that they investigate she is seen to be a caring person. Crime scenes get to her and she becomes a zealot in solving them. Another area that Hamilton delves into with Blake is her love life. Jean-Claude wants her, Richard the lycanthrope falls in love with her. She loves each man differently. The love triangle seems silly, but even worse is that Blake is suppose to be essentially virginal after a relationship ended badly. The choice to not have sex seems too misguided in this series. It makes Blake pitiful and in everything else she is not; she may be short but she carries big guns and silver knives after all. The reader is to believe that she is tough enough not to succumb to her own desires. Yeah, right. I think it more likely that toughness comes from differentiating between sex and love. I like Blake though and am awaiting each novel to see what happens.

She has another series, Merry Gentry, that looks amazing too. But the book store didn't have the first one, so I will wait to begin it. She is a faerie princess after all.

List of works