Guilty Pleasures is the first of the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Series. It’s filled with cool concepts (vampires as citizens, vampire strip clubs, freak parties, the inner-working of a zombie) and catchy descriptions (“silk” and “velvet” adjectives make me happy). But I doubt I’ll continue with the series. It’s described on the cover as a mixture of horror and romance…genre aside, it has too little tension to be scary and too little sex to be sexy.

I also never understood why Anita was a vampire slayer. Batman had a damn good reason for being Batman; I want my vampire slayers to have a MOTIVE. Not just, “It’s what I do.” And there are too many secondary characters. I realize that since this is the first book of a series, she’s introducing the main players, but they tend to blend together.

Like many other works of this style, the tone is first-person and casual, like she’s literally chatting with the reader, asking the reader rhetorical questions. Which is more often corny than appealing.