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Cerulean Sins (the 11th Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter novel) by Laurell K. Hamilton
01/01/2004 . Source: Jennifer Howell 
pub: Orbit/Times Warner. 470 page paperback. Price: £ 6.99 (UK). ISBN: 0-84149-201-9. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out website: www.OrbitBooks.co.uk
Wow! Book eleven already. Easy as it is to compare the 'Anita Blake' books to 'Buffy', it was always a little misleading. While they share much the same penchant for snappy dialogue and either dispatching vampires with pointy sticks or dating them, Laurell K Hamilton's heroine was always more the grown-up.
Very much not the blonde California high school girl, Anita has Mexican heritage, a degree in preternatural studies, raises the dead for a living and is a licensed vampire executioner or The Executioner as the vamps prefer to call her.
She's also notched up a fairly staggering eleven books thus far, set in a world where the undead are (grudgingly) legally recognised citizens, as are just about every were-creature you can think of.
Way back eleven books ago (before Buffy had hit the small screen, interestingly enough), Anita was quite happy just working for Animators Inc., raising zombies for clients and despatching the odd neck-biter when the necessary court order was granted. Book one, 'Guilty Pleasures', is right where I suggest you start reading now if you haven't already. Book eleven, 'Cerulean Sins', is enough to put a new reader off for life, quite frankly.
Not that it's badly written in any way, shape or form, because Hamilton's writing actually seems to have improved this time around.
On a sentence level, it's slick and entertaining, mainly because she can't seem to put a foot wrong with Anita's voice. Anita herself is, as always, wry, bitter, funny and sociopathic by turns and usually exceedingly cool to tag along with. Especially if you can ignore the multitude of super-powers she's picked up along the way to becoming 'not quite as human as she once was'.
The problem is that Hamilton doesn't know when to stop. Apparently, she's now past the stage where any editor is prepared to, y'know, actually edit. I could have happily hacked about 200 pages of godawful sex scenes and boring vampire politics out of 'Cerulean Sins' and been left with a snappy little 300 pages involving a supernatural serial killer and a really, really cool uber-villain called The Mother Of All Darkness. However weird that sounds.
Added to that is Orbit's curious decision to use a cover blurb seemingly not written by someone who's read the book - can anyone show me exactly where Anita is 'asked to raise a corpse that may hold the secret to an ancient crime..."? Um, no, because it doesn't actually happen! I mean, I try to like these later books. I really do. But when you hit page 100 and discover the title actually derives from the colour of the bedclothes in one of the more lurid sex scenes, you have to wonder what kind of image the author is trying to send out.
The explanation that Anita has 'inherited' some kind of vampirism that feeds on sexual energy (think incubus/succubus-inspired) is bandied around a lot but doesn't go anyway towards excusing how bloody dull it all is. If you've made it all the way to book eleven then yes, it's certainly worth reading. The vampire politics mainly involve the European vamps from a few books back turning up to upset the local status quo.
A few plot points do move on and there's some far more interesting events involving international terrorists, a hitman with a zombie problem and the aforementioned serial killer that are unforgivably skirted around.
These are good signs, though, that Hamilton is moving back toward what made her earlier books so great. Sadly, 'Cerulean Sins' is never going to do well being read apart from the rest of the series. The last instalment that could stand-alone was 'Obsidian Butterfly', two books back, and that was a far stronger novel.
Anyone looking for a post-Buffy fix these days could do far worse than start with 'Guilty Pleasures' or try 'Obsidian Butterfly' because Hamilton is capable of really great writing. It's just a shame that 'Cerulean Sins' doesn't have a plot to do it justice.
Jennifer Howell
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