Guilty Pleasures

Rating:
Summary: Light and fun. Dark and seductive.
Review: "Guilty Pleasures" quickly became one of my guilty pleasures. I must admit it: I am an elitist book snob. While I read romance books and other such fluffy nonsense, I hide them when people come to visit, setting out my Kafka and The Iliad.

The first time I picked up the book (probably in 1999 or so) I read it on the recommendation of a friend. I figured it would be light and fluffy and I could read it in two hours or less and set it down. Boy. I was right and I was wrong. Guilty Pleasures is light reading (I don't think anyone would disagree that it is much easier to read than Shakespeare or The Death of Ivan Ilych) but it is hardly fluffy. The characters have sharp teeth... literally. Jean-Claude is a sex-driven vampire and who is in his sights? Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter. Executioner.

The Anita Blake series has its problems (later in the series there is too much sex and not enough meat) but it is incredibly written. The humor that can be found in situations is tantalizing, the sexual energy is seductive, and the darkness is liberating. I picked up Guilty Pleasures and never sat it back down. I recommend this series to anybody who enjoys the darker side of life but doesn't want to read the "heavy" writing in Anne Rice's vampire novels.

Light and fun. Dark and seductive.

Anita Blake.

Rating:
Summary: Anita Blake Vampire Hunter - A Series That Will Suck You In!
Review: "I was here to talk about raising the dead. Not resurrection. I'm not that good. I mean zombies. The shambling dead. Rotting corpses. Night of the living dead. That kind of zombie. Though certainly less dramatic than Hollywood would ever put up on the screen. I am an animator. It's a job, that's all. Like selling." Thus speaks Anita Blake, the heroine of Laurell K. Hamilton's "Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter" series. Vampire hunter, you ask? I thought she worked with zombies. Well, she also does vampires, (the ones who kill humans) - you know, stakes through their hearts, silver bullets, etc.. This is Anita's sideline - a hobby of sorts. The vamps call this 5'3," twenty-four year-old dynamo "The Executioner." She is a feisty, attractive and independent 21st century lady, who finds herself remarkably attracted to Jean-Claude, the very sexy owner of Club Guilty Pleasures...and Master Vampire extraordinaire. She is more than willing to repress these feelings, however. As for Jean-Claude, although he taken just a small bite of Anita, I think he desires more than her blood.

Vampirism has been legal in the USA for almost 2 years, ever since the Supreme Court gave the bloodsucking undead equal rights. America is the only country in the world where these creatures are allowed to, er, live, (?), unless they drain the blood of a human, thereby committing murder. So, even though Anita collaborates with the police's Regional Preternatural Investigation Team when hunting criminal vampires, she needs a court order of execution before she kicks their butts back to the grave. Set in St. Louis, where vampires are much more mainstream than they are on the coasts, "Guilty Pleasures" is Ms. Hamilton's introduction of Anita Blake to the public-at-large.

A serial killer is murdering vampires in Missouri and Nikolaos, the terribly terrifying one thousand year-old Vampire Mistress of St. Louis, has threatened Anita with all kinds of torments and tortures, including becoming one of the undead herself, if she doesn't catch the killer ASAP.

Ms. Hamilton is an excellent writer who, with much flair amd pizzazz, mixes fantasy with mystery, romance and dark humor. Her take on this derivative genre is a most unusual one. The mystery is at the fore of her novels and the supernatural takes second place, almost taken for granted as part of Anita Blake's natural world. And Ms. Blake is a delight - witty, savvy and hard-boiled, as in tough. I am really looking forward to reading more of this series. These novels are a real find!
JANA

Rating:
Summary: I had avoided this series...
Review: Although I love vampire series, because the cover art made me think it was very slanted towards being a romance novel with just a little vampiric story thrown in.

A friend recommended the series to me, recently, and described it and it sounded much more exciting. She was right. Many stories of this type have some exciting vampiric action and then some long lulls of description or more dull events thrown in the middle before getting back to more action. This story is more similar to the first Indiana Jones movie. Where the story never lulls. The action never lulls. And the tension is kept up from the first page til the last.

Good read. Look forward to reading the rest of the series.

Rating:
Summary: Needed more substance
Review: Not the best book I've read this year, not the worst. It seemed to me that with the (SPOILER AHEAD) ease in which Anita dispatched Nickalaos, it is illogical that she was so frightened of her in the first place. It also seemed like the author planned the book to be a series, and therefore several sub-plots were introduced that went nowhere in this installment. I'm all for aiming at a continuing storyline, but a book should stand alone on it's own merits, rather that counting on the future to provide answers. This one didn't quite make it.