Just Finished Reading: Narcissus in Chains by Laurell K. Hamilton

Vampire hunter and Necromancer Anita Blake returns to St Louis after her adventures in New Mexico. But before she can get any rest – or sort out her complicated love life - she’s thrown into another crisis in the Supernatural Community. A new player is in town looking to dominate the world of shape-shifters. Anita must protect her own pack of were-leopards as well as save her werewolf boyfriend from internal enemies and from his own nature. If things aren’t complicated enough Anita’s powers are growing and may be uncontrollable and then there’s Micah, a were-leopard with his own agenda. Only one thing is certain, that in the next few days people are going to die; the only question is who.

This is the 10th book in the Anita Blake series which makes it my longest running set of books – previously held by Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series. Unfortunately this book was rather poor. Actually if this was the first book in the series it’s likely that I wouldn’t have read any others.

One of the major problems with book 10 was that for at least the first 200 pages very little actually happens. The reasons for what actually does happen in the first third of the book are explained later but I could see no reason why LKH took so damned long to get around to the point. There was also far too much sex (both normal and sadomasochistic) and too many long conversations which inevitable stopped any storytelling dead.

When the action finally got off the ground though it was pretty good but failed to compensate for the long slow path getting there. As a main character Anita Blake is priceless and I put up with a lot in this book because of her. But LKH really needs to go with Anita’s strengths and drastically cut back on the sex, torture and pissing contests between the main characters. I think it will be a while before I read the next book in this series. Very disappointing.