Review: Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 5 Bloody Bones by Laurell K. Hamilton

Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 5 Bloody Bones by Laurell K. Hamilton

Anita is recruited for a specialized zombie raising for which she is possibly the only animator in the United States that has a chance of performing the job without a human sacrifice. Bulldozers preparing the ground for a luxury hotel have uncovered and spoiled an ancient cemetery possibly proving that a recent court decision awarded the land to the wrong family and therefore making the sale of the land invalid. Anita’s job is to raise the cemetery and ask the zombies if any of them belonged to the Bouvier family. It’s a fascinating problem, immediately made more complicated when the lawyer who has hired Anita tries to bribe her to give the answer he wants.

 

Then the fresh corpses begin to be found and Anita gets called away from the paying job to consult with police who are afraid she’ll grab the headlines if they let her anyway near their case. Teenagers have been killed in terrible ways and Anita has never seen anything like it.

 

Then—all in the same night—a vampire kills a young woman in her home and Anita—legal Vampire Executioner—is pulled into the night hunt for the most dangerous predatory creature on the planet.

 

Things just go downhill for Anita from there and I haven’t even mentioned the fae connection to the case, or the negotiations with a new hyper-powerful vampire who is ruling the territory next to Jean Claude’s. This is an intense novel which expands the scope of the series to the land near St. Louis. It also teaches the reader some new and horrific things about vampires, and of course, there’s the whole fae thing.

 

The conclusion will push Anita further than we (or she) knew she could go for a fully satisfying story.