I know that my compulsion to hate-read these books is far more perverted than anything Anita ever gets up to in this series, but there it is. I almost feel that I am performing a service for those of you who have had the strength to stop reading the books themselves, yet may feel the danger of back-sliding just to see what is up in the lives of Anita and her horde of vaginal slaves. The answer is nothing. Nothing is up that remotely matters or makes sense.

I'm not going to mark anything in here as a "spoiler," because I don't even know what that means in the context of these books anymore. However, if the fact that I am going to quote parts of the book and that those parts of the book may reveal some of the things that happen in the book will upset you, stop reading now. You have no one but yourself to blame if you continue. Likewise, I guess I should add that if crimes against the profession of editing, the English language, and the Aristotelian Unities upset you, you should also consider yourself warned, because what follows must necessarily be very disturbing, indeed.

Let's first give credit where credit is due...the first half of the book takes place outside of Anita's bedroom, with her doing her job. The Marshall job, anyway. There's a throwaway reference to Animator's, Inc., at one point, mostly to just say that she's never there anymore. Remember how that used to be a thing in this series? But not anymore. This time, Anita is helping break up a hostage situation involving a bunch of vamps who appear to be members of the Undead Tea Party, being composed primarily of old people and near-children who were too young to know what they were doing when they changed over, and only want to yell "FREEDOM!" at everyone else. This is not really all that important, actually. I mean, they provide the background for some of the Dramatic Events in the story that cause Anita to have to kick ass and talk about her weapons and her height and how strong she is like always, but that's it. Consider them not really all that material to the story.

We DO get to walk into the building where they are holed up, though, and get one of those glorious paragraphs where Hamilton tries to get all deep and descriptive, and ends up making no kind of sense whatsoever. To wit:

The room looked like a set for a slasher flick, with dirty walls; pale paint that might have started as white had flaked away from the bricks, so that the paint debris lay at the base of the walls as if something big had clawed at the walls. The question was, had it been clawing to get in, or get out?

First of all, no, that is not the question. Nothing was clawing, in or out. It's just some paint flecks. (Also, if there HAD been clawing, the fact that all of the paint flecks are on the floor inside the building would be a significant clue that the clawing was coming from inside the building as well. I mean, to anyone who happened to be a professional investigator of some sort. Or someone who had ever read a mystery story before.) Finally, way to use the word "walls" THREE TIMES IN ONE SENTENCE. Those familiar with the series will not be surprised to learn that Hamilton's tendency to use the same words repeatedly, and even to seemingly cut and paste whole paragraphs from previous books to re-use several times in the course of each "new" volume has not abated even a little. She also continues her odd quirk of picking a new phrase that everyone in each book suddenly decides to use all the time, in all sorts of situations, and then never use again in subsequent books. In this edition, that phrase is "ass deep in alligators." People cannot stop talking about the damn alligators and their relative proximity to the gluteus maximi of everyone involved. Enjoy it while you can; in the next book no one will have ever heard of alligators.

Also, you will find this paragraph, worded almost exactly the same way, in at least two different parts of the book:

His face already held that darkness, that surety that most men's eyes get at some point when the clothes are coming off and the sex is happening. It's not exactly possessive, but yet it is, but it is predatory .... It wasn't a shapeshifter look, or a vampire look, it was a male look. Maybe women had their own version, but I rarely saw my own face in a mirror during sex, and I had only one other woman to compare to, and she didn't have a look like this one.

Also, lest we forget..."Gods," he said, "I'd forgotten how tight you stay even wet." I don't think we've fully explored the question of whether Anita's vampire marks come with a side-effect of Iron Snatch. There can be no other explanation. On the subject of the vampire marks, though, we do get this:

We'd finally figured out it was Jean-Claude's vampire marks that kept me from being able to shapeshift for real. Modern lycanthropy wasn't contagious to vampires, and I was just too close to being a vampire thanks to his marks, and my own necromancy. Ancient-strain lycanthropy had been contagious to the undead.

What the...one of the longest-standing, enduring, unexplained things in the Anita-verse, and that's ALL the explanation we get for it? Three sentences? Nothing about how we learned this, or from whom? Maybe I missed something in one of the past books, but really, it seems unlike Hamilton not to drive a point like that home with repeated paragraphs for several books in a row. It seems more like she got tired of trying to think of an explanation for why Anita was like this, and decided just to throw this paragraph out there to get rid of it. She needs the space to cut-and-paste more identical sex scenes and comments about how tight and wet Anita is AT ALL TIMES, dammit!

In further news of writerly laziness, it is determined that maybe Asher should go be the master of a new city, because he is a big pissy baby and everyone is sick of him. What new city, you ask? A new city. One that is new. Asher and his New City are mentioned forty-eleven time, and the place is never named, although it is clear they are referring to a specific place and not just "somewhere else." For the love of...just THROW A DART AT A MAP if it is so hard to decide where to put him! Topeka! Ypsilanti! Boca Raton! Just pick one! It doesn't matter, except in the way that it draws the reader's attention to the fact that you can't be bothered to put any effort into your writing anymore!

Finally, just for the pure WTF-ery of it, I present the following statement:

It just giggled me, and I was starting to own the things that made me happy, not because it made sense, or was horribly important, but it was just a happy.

I have no idea what that means. It looks like a sentence that was run through Google Translate a few times, from English to Thai to Flemish to Portuguese to Farsi and back to English again. Ladies and gentlemen, the word-stylings of Laurell K. Hamilton, alleged native English speaker.

Now I need to go lie down with a cool compress on my brow so that I can forget about all of this nonsense until the next book comes out.