When a fifteen-year-old girl is abducted by vampires, it’s up to U.S. Marshal Anita Blake to find her. And when she does, she’s faced with something she’s never seen before: a terrifyingly ordinary group of people—kids, grandparents, soccer moms—all recently turned and willing to die to avoid serving a master. And where there’s one martyr, there will be more…
But even vampires have monsters that they’re afraid of. And Anita is one of them…
In the latest installment of the Anita Blake series Anita is called in to help find a missing teenage girl. She is working alongside SWAT and her old friend Zerbrowski while heading into a vampire den. They didn’t realize that they were walking into a trap set specifically for Anita.
After a hard day of vampire executions, all Anita wants to do is go home to her sweeties and wash all the vampire goo off her. What she finds is trouble brewing with Asher, he is feeling sorry for himself and starting fights with the others, including Anita. She doesn’t have time for his drama, especially when her sweetie is being held hostage by a fanatic with a bomb.
I have developed a love/hate relationship with this series. I remember when my brother gave me the first book in the series to read, I was hooked. I devoured all of the books up through Obsidian Butterfly and loved them. My love/hate relationship started with Narcissus in Chains when things started to really change for Anita and her men. The books started to contain a whole lot more sex and less content, yet I keep reading them.
Anita is still wrestling with her polyamorous lifestyle but she is finally becoming more comfortable with her numerous sweeties. They have all settled into a routine and everyone, but Asher, seems to be learning to share. Cin is still trying to get Anita to see him as an adult not a child because she is still struggling with his age.
To me this story seemed to drag through three quarters of the book and then the actual climax covered the last 25 or so pages. It was full of “fluff” to fill the pages and really wasn’t needed; the story is a good story if you take out the extras. I think the ending made me want to throw the book, you had all the buildup and then BAM the story is over.
I did enjoy the fact that Anita is spending more time doing police work and seems to be getting back to her “roots” so to speak. There was a lot less sex in the book, don’t get me wrong I don’t mind sex in books but sometimes it overpowered her stories. I also love the fact that we got to see Micah, Nathanial, Jason and Jean Claude along with some of the other well-loved characters. I would’ve loved to see more old school, bad a$$ Anita raise some zombies but at least she is back to working with her friends at the police station and FBI.
Overall this was not my favorite story in the Anita Blake series but it is closer to the early stories than some of the others. I give Kiss the Dead 3 Flaming Hearts.
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