In the second book in Hamilton's Anita Blake series, Blake is offered a million dollars to raise a centuries-old corpse, and is called in by the police on a brutal murder apparently committed by a zombie. The novel begins with a bang and then slumps into 150 pages of Anita walking around St. Louis talking to people. In particular the endless sexual tension with Jean-Claude, the new master vampire of the city who's taken a fancy to Anita, is really tedious. Things perk up at the end when the zombie is tracked down, Anita is kidnapped and the plot threads are all tied off. As in the first book, she can take a cartoonish amount of punishment, getting mauled by a zombie, beaten up, shot, sliced, and mind-controlled in the last few pages, yet she still keeps going and never faints from loss of blood or suffers from any impairment.

One of the back blurbs calls the series "an R-rated Buffy", but that's not true, primarily because Anita's characterization is so one-note. I won't be reading any more of the series

Released on Wednesday, March 17, 2004 at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland USA.

Putting this on the book exchange shelves in the library