Saturday, January 3, 2009

The Killing Dance

Title: The Killing Dance
Author: Laurell Hamilton
Series: Anita Blake Vampire Hunter, Book 6
Genre: Urban fantasy, novel
Published: 1997

Recommendation: For fans of the series who enjoyed the plots and the mysteries, you can skip this one. If you want more of Anita, Jean-Claude, Richard romance, then it's a book for you. For those who haven't read the series, this book wouldn't work well as a stand-alone.
Rating: 6/10

Summary: Edward calls up Anita to let her know someone has tried to hire him to kill her for half a million dollars. He comes into town to serve as her bodyguard and several attempts on her life end up with the assassins dead, but they don't stop coming. At the same time Richard is still facing the dominance fight with Marcus. And Jean-Claude has not given up on Anita.

Reactions:
Sadly, the series seems to be going downhill. Most of the book focuses on the love triangle between Jean-Claude, Anita, and Marcus. A lot of pages are spent working up the tension between everyone involved. For the first time in the series there are some quite explicit sex scenes. I may have been complaining that it wasn't very modern of Anita to not have sex, but in this book the plot gave way to the romance and I wouldn't call it an improvement. Way too much time is spent on everyone's sexy outfits and describing various body parts.

While some of the books had decent plot twists at the end, I found this one to be obvious from the moment we find out there is a time-based contract on Anita. There are a few small surprises along the way, but not nearly enough time is spent on the mystery. In addition, Anita becomes more of a killing machine in this book than in the previous ones. There used to be more deduction involved, but in this case she just shoots her way through until the end of the novel.

I am considering whether to stop reading the series. While Dexter is an interesting show, watching a character I once liked deteriorate to the point of a sociopath is disappointing.

First Line: The most beautiful corpse I'd ever seen was sitting behind my desk.

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