Occultober Day 16 Obsidian Butterfly by Laurell K. Hamilton

Occultober Day 16 Obsidian Butterfly by Laurell K. Hamilton

Laurell K. Hamilton is one of the writers who popularized the urban fantasy genre with her Anita Blake series. Obsidian Butterfly is hands down the best book in the series, so it’s surprising that it is totally separate from the carefully crafted setting in St. Louis with all of Anita’s friends, enemies, and romantic interests. In fact, the only person who has appeared before in this novel is Edward, the assassin who trained Anita to survive being a vampire hunter. Edward, who’s legal name in New Mexico is Ted Forester, is a cold-blooded sociopath who’s only pleasure in life comes from killing things. The tougher the kill, the more he likes it. Or at least that’s what Anita always thought of Edward. Then she meets his flower-child fiancé and her two children and everything she thought she knew is overturned. The problem, she fears, is that she wasn’t wrong in her first assessment. Edward has gotten himself into a social problem he can’t extricate himself from and she’s worried it might end up killing these three innocents.

 

But that isn’t the problem that brought her to New Mexico. Someone—the feds think it’s a serial killer or two—is murdering people by chopping some of them up and skinning the others. The true horror comes from the fact that the skinned people are all still alive. They can’t talk, but they can move, and sometimes bite, and no one can figure out how this horror was inflicted upon them. This is a fate that is much worse than death and Hamilton does a wonderful job at showing how the possibility of ending like this is unsettling some of the hardest killers in the world. She also does a great job of unfolding the mystery, laying out the clues that show how Anita, with her peculiar background as an animator, can contribute to these major investigations despite tremendous hostility toward her as a woman, a civilian, and a “zombie queen”.

 

As if all of that wasn’t great enough, Hamilton introduces two more of Edward’s associates: a bounty hunter, and Olaf—a serial killer almost as disturbing as whatever is killing these people—and these two—especially Olaf—really ratchet up the tension as we come to realize that Anita fits this disturbing man’s victim profile.

 

Yet, even this isn’t enough, because Edward’s pacifist fiancé has gotten herself into some trouble of her own with a biker gang that threatens to be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back in this adventure—and I haven’t even mentioned the super spooky master vampire whose name is also the title of the book. She’s a thousand years old and think she’s an Aztec goddess and she brings oodles of additional drama into an already extraordinary tale.

 

If you’ve ever read an Anita Blake novel and enjoyed it even the tiniest bit, you should make time to read this one. If you’ve never read one, I think you can come into this novel fresh. It does build on what’s happened earlier in the series, but because all of the action is outside of Anita’s usual stomping grounds, I think this one makes a good standalone book for anyone wondering what all the fuss is about.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...

 

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