Ubalblog

[  Mood: Amused ]
[  Currently: Listening to CBC Radio ]
It is no secret that I have said some not so nice things about this series in the past, but yet I retun to it book after book, hoping that Hamilton will have gotten over exploring her sexual fantasies and actually write plot driven fiction.

It appears my prayers have finally been answered in her latest novel, Skin Trade.

And when I said that my prayers have been answered, I wasn’t kidding. Hamilton doesn’t let Anita have sex until after page 300 of the book. There are a total of three sex scenes in this book; two we see and one that we don’t. That has to be the smallest number in an Anita Blake novel in a long time.

Instead, we are treated to a plot full of tension and action, which harkens bake to the early entries in this series. We open with Anita receiving a severed head in the mail from vampire and serial killer, Vittorio. He has apperantly also left her a note, appropriately in blood, at the crime scene in hopes of drawing her to Los Vegas.

Anita has no choice but to go, but once there is forced to defend her reputation when the local cops accuse her of being a slut, while fending off the advances of another US Marshall (who is, coincidentally, also a serial killer), the political machinations of the local weretiger queen and the attempts of a very old European vampire to take control of her.

Hamilton may have finally found the balance between the sex and the action for which she claims to have been looking for all along. The only thing that detracts from the story is the constant "vetting" that Anita has to go through. Either Anita is on tough cookie who is really good at her job, or she isn’t. Having to have her prove it to every cop she runs into and go through the same arguments with the same ineundos and accusations being made is getting as tiring as the sex scenes used to be. Until she resolves this constant melodrama, her writing will never be as good as it was in the early books.