Review: Cerulean Sins by Laurell K. Hamilton

Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 11Cerulean Sins by Laurell K. Hamilton

This series went off the rails with this book. It starts out well, with Anita agreeing to raise a dead man for a contract killer but quickly devolves into several hundred pages of vampire politics and sex that frankly bored me to tears. It felt like we’d seen the politics before and there was nothing new in them. And the sex did nothing to advance the plot while doing everything to finish demolishing one of the things that made Anita Blake such an interesting person. Sex and the relationships she wanted to go with it were very important to her through most of this series—so much so that it was a driving force / obstacle in her love triangle with Jean Claude and Richard. But Hamilton apparently wants to write big sex scenes and since this is a first-person narrative, that means she has had to fundamentally change Anita’s personality. To justify this Hamilton introduced the ardeur—a vampiric need to feed through sex—but I don’t believe that it improved the storyline at all. What’s more, Anita’s need for sex takes up a ton of pages that would have been far better spent developing a more traditional Anita Blake mystery.

 

That being said, there are some good things about this book. About halfway through the novel, the emphasis returns to plot and the story improves rapidly. There is a new vampire threat in the person of the vampire who made Jean Claude and there is a new serial killer in town that proved to be an interesting challenge.

 

Even better, Anita’s relationship with policeman, Dolph, finally collapses as his personal problems combined with Anita’s intimacy with a growing number of “monsters” drive him into a breakdown. I’ve always liked Dolph and watching Anita and Detective Zebrowski work their way through this Dolph problem was often touching. The serial killer and Dolph storylines save the novel.