Flirt (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #18)

by Laurell K. Hamilton

[wyvernfriend]

The more I think about this book the more it creeps me out.

There will be spoilers.

So it's a typical Anita Blake novel from the recent lot. Jean-Claude is at a distance, Richard is invisible boy and mostly Anita is working with the were-pack of toy boys.

The story starts with an incident that is apparently based on a real-life incident Laurell has with some friends while travelling (only with more clothes, Anita's men seem to favour tank-tops). Recounted by Laurell in an afterword and shown in a cartoon it's vaguely entertaining.

Bracketing this Anita has meets with clients who want her to resurrect their dead spouses, neither for good reasons. I'm not quite sure why Tony Bennington wants his spouse back, he doesn't come across as wanting her, just wanting the appearance of her. The other, Ms Natalie Zell wants to punish her husband for dying on her. So when someone kidnaps Anita and some of her harem to force her to resurrect a body, they're not sure. The kidnappers have cut Anita off from her power and Anita has to use one of them to save her men.

So she takes his free will from him. And then debates with her guys about letting him join her harem. She basically rapes him, and then dismisses the consequences as if they didn't exist. This is one of my problems with Anita, her actions have little consequence, she doesn't really regret much about how she treats people, it's her past that matters, her issues that surface again and again.

I'd like to see a book where Jean Claude and Richard do an intervention, force her to think, to actually pay attention to the consequences of her actions rather than drifting through her world collecting power tokens and gaining a lot of power, too much power. She imbalances the power in the world and there's nothing done about that.

And then there's the taster of the next book, where a five-year-old insists on being kissed on the lips, like the big boys do and I'm squicked even more.

Sorry, no, this is it. I have to stop punishing myself like this and declare an end to reading this series. This was a short that I flew through and it's made me quite squicked with the world, I now need to read something exceedingly fluffy to ensure I don't lose the plot entirely.