Inquiries also turn up the fact tha t there have been similar killings in other cities, and it looks like the killers are stepping up the pace. It's not long before there's another stripper killed, the same way, and the bite marks match those from the first killing. The story opens with a murder, a vampire-gang murder of a stripper at a local strip club, which looks like it might be the work of a serial killer. (No, she's not a wereleopard herself.) But, really, her love life is more complicated than that, and gets more so as the story progresses.

In this capacity, she gets consulted by the local police in what are or might be preternatural crimes, a lot.Īll of that might be relatively straightforward, if she weren't also one of the lovers of Jean-Claude, Master of the local vampires, and Nimir-Ra of the local wereleopard clan and lover of Micah Callahan, their Nimir-Raj. By day (loosely speaking) she's a professional resurrectionist, raising the quite restful dead as zombies for a few hours so that they can answer such crucial questions as 'what did this clause in your will really mean?' By night (usually), she's a federal marshal, the go-to person when a vampire's gone bad and you need him staked, quickly and permanently.

Anita Blake has the ability to sense and to some degree control the restless dead, which is the basis of both of her lines of work. The vampires and werebeasts, at least, have some legal rights, but distinctly limited ones. Hamilton does a pretty good job of salting in enough background and character history that the new reader has a sense, however illusory, of knowing what's going on.įor those as new to the series as I was: Vampires, werebeasts (wolves, leopards, and rats, most prominently in this book), zombies, and other unnatural and frequently nasty things really exist. Nevertheless, despite the fact that I was plunging in cold, with no prior background other than the fact that there was an 'Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter' series, I only occasionally and briefly found myself feeling a bit lost.

For regular readers, the background has been pretty thoroughly filled in and can be taken for granted, the regular characters all have tons of shared history providing context for their current interactions-and on top of all that, most series, if they reach book twelve, have started to run down several books back. This is the twelfth book in Hamilton's 'Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter' series, which is a bad place to start any series.

Incubus dreams