Rating: 
Summary: Waiting on the next book
Review: I enjoyed this book but not nearly as much as Narcissus in Chains. The plot line was rushed and the initial story was rushed to a finish at the end in a clumsy merge. I am anxiously awaiting the new book.
Rating: 
Summary: It should have been called Sex Sins
Review: The latest in the Anita Blake series is just as bad as the last. I am sorry I read it, it changed my opinion of the character of Anita Blake. The older books were mystery and a no nonsense kinda girl who pulled no punches. Now the whole book is about sex and, in my opinion, the downfall of Anita Blake. She is so out of character anymore, that it is no fun to read. When over 200 pages are devoted to sex scenes, I might as well read romance novels.
Rating:
Summary: Missing Something...
Review: I bought this book not so much because I was looking forward to it, but more because I can't stand to own an unfinished series. There is a small bit of story, a plot you might even say about a gang of Edward like bad guys who appear, then are forgotten because Hamilton spends the next 150 pages throwing Anita from one disjointed love scene to the next (although I have to admit Jason's "take one for the team" was kind of funny, not sexy, just funny). After everything has been resolved with the Vampires and Anita has two new guys to have sex with, the bad guys come back and you learn a little bit more about these "black ops" groups that Anita's world touches. This is why the book gets 2 stars instead of 1.
The story has numerous inconsistency errors with the previous novels (ages of vampires, characterization problems), and several notable errors with tense, spelling, grammar, that her editor should have caught. Although at this point I do not think anyone is actively editing her books. One thing that has bugged me is that if you are going to have your characters engage in actions that they (the character) perceive as morally wrong, either stop it or get over it. The guilt thing is not only unconvincing (it is applied inconsistently), it is damn annoying. At least the Meredith series is sex without guilt. Although, it looks a lot like Hamilton trying to re-write Anita without the moral code. (Even the dialog is similar.) The only difference between Meredith and Anita is hair colour, and one is descended from 6 (or was it 7?) fertility gods and goddesses, and the other is descended from farmers and as Anita put it in this book "peasant stock".
Now to give you a little background, my friend knows Hamilton. He was the one who gave me the first Anita novel, and his roommate was in Hamilton's wedding. If anyone was wondering why a plot driven series would suddenly turn into an exploration into graphic sex, then the answer is she got married. Now several years into it, it seems that the effects are permanent. If she wants to write the be-all and end-all novel on erotic S&M D&S she is a little late. If you are looking for a novel on alternative or gay erotica, look elsewhere. This book is not it. If you can't stand to not have all the books in a series buy it, it is the only reason I can think of to get this book.
Rating:
Summary: What happened to Guilty pleasures?
Review: I have been a fan of the AB novels since I worked at a bookstore 3 years ago and got hooked. After I'd read all the ones to that date,I'd salivate each time a new book came out. I loved the fact that Laurell was able to so easily incporporate magic and fantasy into a regular world setting. It was great having a female heroine who though human (she loved Sigmund) was as tough and capable as any male one. The characters personalities were all different and each novel more exciting. There was that perfect combination of action, fantasy, realism and romance. But in this last book, all the personalities seem to have changed, or become the same. Anita herself has metamorphed from a wise mouthed, capable woman, into someones chew or sex toy. The writing doesnt even read the same; She sounds more like a star struck teen then The Executioner. Since when does Anita start going goo goo eyed whenever a good looking guy is around? The language is also a bit off... A bit too graphic and way too many sex scenes. I mean, wasn't she supposed to feel guilty about sleeping with two guys at the same time, let alone having a menage a trois?
Don't get me wrong, a little bit of erotica can go a long way--I know all Anita fans were cheering when she finally gave in to Jean Claude, but Ive stuck with this series because Anita was a fun, realistic hard-ass, not the herione of a Harlequin novel.
I will stick with the series till the next novel comes out, hoping thinngs will change. I do think the ardeur needs to wear off though, and she has to start getting her priorites straight. Bring back some past characters and close up loose ends like Edward and Donna and Olaf, and expand on the new themes, not just tease. And Ms. Hamilton PLEASE stop making the men more feminine then the women in each passing novel! No more male make-up! You are a wonderful author but fire your editor...I found more typos then plot in this last book.
Rating: 
Summary: A dissapointment
Review: I am a huge fan of the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Series. Until this book, I had been very satisfied with Ms.Hamilton's work. When the book started out, I thought that it had the potential to be as good as the others and a an exellent follow up to Narcissus in Chains. However, I discovered otherwise. This book turned out to be just a bunch of unexplored ideas. In Cerulean Sins, Anita Blake comes face to face with some of her most formidable enemies. Belle Morte, the sourdre de sang of Jean-Claude's line, is coming to St. Louis. Well, Belle isn't coming but Musette (one of her favorite pet vampires) is coming and acting as Belle's surrogate. In addition to the trouble that Belle's visit causes, Anita's complex love life isn't getting any easier. Especially since she and Asher have explored their sexual potential... Richard is still struggling to accept who and what he is and this weakens the power of the triumverate( A triumverate of power forged by Anita, Jean-Claude, and Richard.)
In regards to Anita's love life there is too much sex and very little plot. However, a positive is that Jason gives some surprisingly relevent observations while he is psycho analyzing Anita. Jason is finally growing up. In order to add to the chaos, Anita has mysterious stalkers who follow her in her car and finds that they may be connected to acts of terrorism. While Belle Morte tries to "own" Anita, Anita recieves an unexpected encounter with the Mother of all Darkness which can't lead to anything good... Over all, this book had lots of potential but each plot went un explored and took a back seat to the sex. Also, Ms. Hamilton seems to have a desire to destroy the mental well being of her characters (i.e. Richard, Dolph.)This proves to be very irritating to the reader. The villains, rather than menacing were annoying. I hope to see better things from Ms. Hamilton than the lack of depth she has shown us here. Still a mustread for die hard Anita fans, anyone else would be best advised to avoid this book.
Rating:
Summary: NOT MY FAVORITE OF THE SERIES
Review: I'M A BIG FAN OF LAURELL K. HAMILTON'S ANITA BLAKE SERIES. I CAN'T SAY I DIDN'T ENJOY THIS BOOK, BUT IT WASN'T AS EXCITING AS THE OTHERS, PARTICUARLY BLUE MOON. I WANTED MORE OF RICHARD IN THIS ONE AND THERE WAS VERY LITTLE. I CONTINUE TO LOOK FORWARD TO THE NEXT BOOK IN THIS SERIES.
Rating: 
Summary: The Art Of The Story-Arc
Review: It used to be that television tried to be like books. Today, it's more that books are trying to be like television! When I set out to write a story like my vampire novel, Those Of My Blood ...I think in terms of tv series such as Buffy, Angel, Andromeda, MutantX, Smallville, Enterprise. So in P. N. Elrod's "The Vampire Files" series and here in the "Anita Blake" series, and in a mundane detective series like Faye Kellerman's "Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus", you are getting a Babylon5 (or Dallas) style "story-arc". Some readers find that confusing, distracting or diluting, while others thrive on it. "Anita Blake" is one of those series that moves at the pace of a soap opera, with about a year's progress in each novel. In the first novel, Guilty Pleasures, 1995, Anita Blake is possessed by her self-image. One cornerstone of the identity she thinks she has is her idea of who she will or will not sleep with. In Cerulean Sins, we struggle with Anita through a collapse of that entire cornerstone of her identity. She was so sure of herself. She was willing to die or to kill rather than do what she's doing in this novel. Why is she doing this? Because over the course of these novels, Anita has acquired aspects of the magical creatures she's been dealing with -- vampires, werewolves and were-cats. She has not become vampire or were-anything. But she has these traits magically rooted into her identity, and that magic is forcing a change in her identity. Now, in Cerulean Sins, she is a victim of a kind of sexual esurience as powerful as the vampire's bloodlust. If she fails to have sex, she will go mad with it and force herself on someone -- possibly on someone she cares for or someone she hates. She will have no conscious choice. The very thing we originally marveled at in her character -- her absolute refusal to be anyone's or anything's victim -- is gone. She is a victim of her own esurience for sex. Worse. This esurience has been forced upon her -- not exactly against her will, but still forced on her. She is helpless against the results of the choices she has made. Karmically, she has come to exactly the place she was headed to in Guilty Pleasures. The sense of "confusion" and the difficulty in following the plot that some readers have had stems from the way Anita's internal loosing-battle has left her essential character in tattered shreds. Anita is "confused" so we are confused. Anita can't "follow" her own life, so we can't follow the plot. Anita was a "winner" -- she's "won" every physical battle in all these books. But with each win, she's lost something of "herself." And in this book, she's more loser than winner, very much aware that each win is an irretrievable loss. She is on the edge of despair. Considering who she used to be, that is massively confusing. The background of this series is "fantastic" -- vampires with civil rights, werewolves who teach high school, weretigers, necromancy -- all of it is so "unreal". Therefore the psychology of the characters must be impeccably "real" to the reader so that the fantastic will seem plausible. The classic test for whether a novel is science fiction (or fantasy) or not is whether you still have a story when you remove the "science". The "science" in the Anita Blake series is psychology. Psychology is the core science behind all magick, as Dion Fortune and Marion Zimmer Bradley describe it. If you remove the psychology from the "Anita Blake" series, or from P. N. Elrod's "The Vampire Files" series, you no longer have a story. Therefore, these series are in fact Occult Fantasy -- just like Buffy The Vampire Slayer. If you can't follow the psychology, you won't find any story here that you can get your ahem teeth into. Live Long and Prosper,
Jacqueline Lichtenberg ...
Rating:
Summary: The center will not hold
Review: I just finished this chapter of the Anita Blake saga two days ago. You will find the kinky sex and sadism here that the series leads one to expect. The "Executioner" also executes a couple of monsters along the way. There are simultaneous plots going on, here again as a series reader might expect, that tie together at the end with enough open ended strings to which another novel can be tied. And for you vampire mind game fans there is plenty of that and various vamp and shapeshifter politics. One of the other reviewers talked about character development. I think a better description might be character disintigration. Blake the charcter that drives this series appears to be not changing so much as slipping away. I hope this isn't too an oscure reference, but she seems to be disapparing like Slothrop in Pychon's _Gravity's Rainbow_. There are central parts of the character like her obsession with weapons and clothes, and her massive moral delemmas that have just slipped away. One used to know what Anita was wearing and exactly how her weapons were hidden by her choice of clothes. And the question of who the real monsters seems to have just disappeared. It's always disturbing when a writer gets tired of a character, especially when the charcter drives the fiction and the plots are woven around her. I think this phenomenon is occuring here. Sorry to see it.
Rating:
Summary: Weakest Anita Blake book so far...
Review: Like the 10th book in the series - Narcissus in Chains - the focus of Cerulean Sins is very much on Anita Blakes emotional conflicts with her lovelife. It is almost as if the action has taken a backseat in preference of detailed and lengthy description of Anitas erotic encounters. The book is not badly written, but I soon found myself skipping large parts of the book to get on with the plot. And talking about "plot", there isnt much, if you look past the emotinal and erotic stuff. It is allmost as if that IS the plot. Before long I was thinking: "If I see the word "ardeur" ONE more time, I'm going to scream!" If you have read the book, you will know what I mean... :-)
I have been told that mrs. Hamilton has twice as many female readers compared to males, so maybe she is simply adjusting her style to fit her main audience. In the later books Anita Blake seems to have changed her personality from the Marlowe-Gumshoe kinda toughie to a whiny gothic drama queen. Character development is a good thing, but to me "the new" Anita Blake is far less entertaining than the old one. Despite this, I find mrs. Hamilton to be an excellent writer and I will continue to follow the Anita Blake series to see where it goes in the future. If for nothing else, then because I've been a fan from the beginning.
But so far I consider the first nine books to be vastly superior to the last two. Therefore I would recommend that new readers start with book nr.1 - Guilty Pleasures - and work their way up. Book 1 to 9 are brilliant, book 10 is a bit slow, but sums everything up nicely. Cerulean Sins is the worst of the bunch so far, in my humble opinion.
Rating:
Summary: Better than Narcissus
Review: While Cerulean Sins is better than the previous book, and I did enjoy it, I was underwhelmed. I mean, next to how much I absolutely LOVED Guilty Pleasures and Blue Moon, I feel 4 stars is too much. However, I did enjoy it so therefore 4 stars. The sex didn't bother me as much this time. It seemed to be sex with love and affection...though it's hard to see how Anita can have a harem. I like Jason a lot. Richard is a pain. Asher is interesting. If you love the Anita Blake series, you will probably enjoy this book. Not as much as the ones before Narcissus. Still. My advice is wait for the paperback though.
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