Anita Blake

In The Killing Dance, Anita faces a new and unusual threat: a human assassin seeking to collect a cool half-million in return for her untimely demise. But assassins are only the beginning; the problems that Richard has created within his pack by trying to encourage a non-violent exchange of power are growing, and Jean-Claude’s “more photogenic, less monstrous” vampire regime is less than stable at the present. In that context, the obligatory murder mystery is almost anticlimatic.

Who do you call when you have a mass grave that’s two centuries old and you want to raise them all from the dead? Anita Blake, of course. No one else can do it. But it’s never as simple as that. Where The Lunatic Cafe served to broaden the Anitaverse to include lycanthropes, Bloody Bones reaches into a different sort of mythology: fairy tales. Specifically, the Faerie, cold iron and four-leaf clovers and bad nursery rhymes and all.

Having established Jean-Claude as Master of the City in Circus of the Damned, in The Lunatic Cafe the attention shifts to Richard… Richard, Anita’s science teacher and romantic interest… as well as beta wolf to Marcus in the local werewolf pack by way of a bad batch of lycanthrope vaccine. And while Anita learns to deal with her beloved getting furry once a month, she’s handed a missing-lycanthrope case and a naga skin.

Anita Blake and Jean-Claude struggle to sort out their love lives as a rogue pack of vampires moves into town, determined to take over the reins from the new Master of the City – and not incidentally, to leave a few corpses for the police to investigate in the process. What sounds like the plot of a novel is only another day in Anita’s harried life, and it doesn’t get any easier from there.

Anita Blake is back, and this time she’s asked to sort out a murderous zombie while convincing Jean-Claude, the vampire Master of the City, that dinner and a movie really aren’t in her schedule, especially not when the undead are asking. And as if that wasn’t enough, one of her clients wants her to raise a someone from the dead… someone long enough in the grave to require a human sacrifice.

Guilty Pleasures is the first novel in a long-running series. The novel is set in a world very like our modern world, with a few minor differences: primarily the strong presence of the supernatural. In fact, that presence is so strong that vampires have been granted legal rights, a vaccine has been developed for lycanthropy, and degrees in “preternatural biology” are not unknown. Anita Blake is making her way in the world through the use of her supernatural talents; specifically, her ability to raise the dead as zombies.