Guilty Pleasures

It’s the end of a busy day, and there’s just time for me to post up a new review before I head off to bed, so here it is.

Laurell K Hamilton

In a world where vampires and other paranormal creatures are openly acknowledged, and in some cases have legal rights and responsibilities, Anita Blake is an animator – she raises the dead for a living. When she’s not doing that she’s a consultant to the police on paranormal incidents, if someone gets attacked and the attacker isn’t human she gets asked to identify the creature and to help deal with it; she’s also the legal executioner of vampires that have gone rogue.

In the first book in this series Anita Blake is called in to help the police with a series of murders. The city’s vampire leader wants her help as well because some of the victims are vampires, and when the killer isn’t found quickly enough Anita finds herself caught between an impatient and angry master vampire and a killer with the strength to rip a person’s heart out.

This book is never going to be considered a masterpiece, or be considered a classic work of literature, but I found it a very enjoyable read. As a fan of mythology and the paranormal, I’m always interested by books about vampires, and in this case the vampires are characters in their own right with enough ambiguity about them to make it tough to say they are all evil and should be killed.

That’s the problem Anita has, she doesn’t really like vampires but the more she deals with them the more she realises that in many ways they’re as human as anyone else – not necessarily good but not necessarily evil either.

What really makes this book enjoyable is the character of Anita Blake; she’s small, has a bit of an attitude problem, and won’t back away from a fight – I like her.