I honestly have to admit that Laurell K. Hamilton is my favorite female author. I love both of the series she's writing because I love the way she writes. The characters she creates seem more realistic than a lot of those in other books I've read. They seem much more rounded out, or fleshed out rather, to the point where I could actually feel I would know them if they were real.

It's hard to continue writing a series. I have trouble writing a chapter or two, personally. I know it takes a lot of work, a lot of notes, and an editor that is helpful in a way that doesn't hinder the writing process, but enhance it. Seriously, how many things can you throw at one person? I love the Anita Blake series because even though Anita doesn't think she can handle it, she not only finds a way to do so but she always has people backing her up, even if she doesn't expect them to do so.

I haven't gotten a chance to continue the Merry Gentry saga because I've been focused on the Anita Blake one, and so I have not read past book 2 of the Merry Genty books. Also being short on cash at this time, it's hard to set aside money for a book when you need to buy milk. I will find a way!

If you decide to read the Anita Blake series, obviously you'll want to start with the first one, Guilty Pleasures, which you can find at the top of my amazon widget to the right. Also, please don't get agitated with the first couple of chapters. I thought they were a bit slow and drawn out and it took me forever to read them because I was aggravated. If you sit down and read through them quickly, you'll be fine, if you tend to get distracted, try to find a way to at least skim through them and then go back as a reference. I don't know why these chapters made me itch so much but once I got through them I couldn't put the book down. Luckily, I had bought the first two books together so I was able to continue on when I finished it.

I can't remember what books I was buying when I was at Waldenbooks when a stranger walked up to me and looked at what I was buying, told me if I liked that type of author that I would absolutely love Laurell K. Hamilton. I have to admit, I was quite skeptical, but since the first two books were extremely well priced I bought them and took them home. I didn't touch them until I finished reading what I had bought (I can't believe I've forgotten).

When I first started reading Guilty Pleasures it made me itch. I didn't think I could sit there and read it. The first chapter about killed me, but since I have reread it I don't know why. It may have been because this was a completely new author, a different writing style than I'm used to, or something else that I'll never quite realize.

The chapters in Guilty Pleasures aren't long, but they are good. There isn't any formal introduction right away about what's going on or even who the heck Anita Blake is, perhaps that's what I'm used to, being introduced to the characters. You get pulled in slowly, kind of like fishing (you, the reader, are the fish) and the next thing you know the book is over, the case is solved and you are still hungry for more.

This book introduces you to Anita's world full of Vampires, Shapeshifters, Magic and more. The things that occur in this book are what shapes who Anita becomes later on, who she is forced to be. It is a foundation on which the other books have built and you can't just pick up in the middle of the series and expect to know what's going on.

There are several reasons why I like Anita. She seems like a real person. Laurell did something wonderful when she created Anita. I can actually feel as if I went to St. Louis that I could run into this woman on the street. It's absolutely amazing what I feel when I read about her 'life' and the things that are going on. There are times where I felt angry when she was angry because I'd be angry about being woken up by the phone after only two hours of sleep as well. Who wouldn't? That's something normal people would be angry about. I can also see myself relenting to being designated driver for a friend's bachelorette party.

I enjoy Anita's bluntness. She let's you know she has no clue as to what you are trying to tell her, she lets you know what she thinks and what she's going to do about it. There are very few times I have seen her hesitate. If she's going to shoot someone, she shoots them until they are dead. Yes, the books are violent and filled with gore, don't let the kiddies read them.

The first book is a great introduction to Anita's background, her strengths and weaknesses, her personal morality and it gives you an insight into how the series may progress. The first book is also a good length, it's short and to the point. You get introduced, you get hooked and you go buy the second book. I've enjoyed reading it more than once, as I have the others.

Throughout Guilty Pleasures you learn the rules of dealing with Vampires, never look into their eyes or they can enthrall you. There are laws protecting the vampires from the humans and vice versa. There are, of course, loop holes along the way that are exploited.

While becoming familiar with Anita and her life, she's also solving a case and trying to stay alive while doing it. You'll get to go on adventures with her in every book and they will keep you entertained, enthralled, in fear. So if you like horror, romance, thrillers and mysteries, you should enjoy these books. They have sex, violence, blood and magic, again, don't let the kiddies read them. So start your adventure with Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, in book one - Guilty Pleasures.

Book 2 of the Anita Blake saga, The Laughing Corpse, won't leave you in tears laughing your pants off. It will make you shiver and shake in fear if the main killer creature in this book were real.

Anita's schedule is filled with a killer zombie, a queen of voodoo, attempting to keep the master of the city arm's length away and attempting to keep doing her job as well without being killed for it.

If you can't stand gore, I suggest you not bother with this series. If you can handle gory movies like Saw and its like, then you can handle this book. People get torn apart, children get eaten, it's that horrific. If this book were reality I'd never live in St. Louis or anywhere else crazy supernatural things like this happened, but with my luck they'd come to me.

The Laughing Corpse is a comedy club owned by the new Master of the City, Jean-Claude. Anita doesn't know until she chooses it as a place to meet him regarding his so-called claim on her as his human servant.

Alas, if this were the main story of this book, it would have been a pleasurable read, not that it wasn't mind you, because it was. Anita kicked ass and took names. She saved a womans life and probably a few families' lives as well. This book gives you the reason as to why she wishes to be cremated at her death and I sympathize with her.

Anita also gets to meet up with the Queen of Voodoo, Dominga Salvador, the woman no one would ever piss off and looks so sweet and grandmotherly you'd never think she was filled to the hilt with evil. She creates zombies and puts their souls back into their rotting bodies, of course, the body stops rotting when she does that, but still, who would want to be replaced in their dead body? Not I.

Dominga isn't thrilled that Anita refuses to help her in her enterprising business and sends along a few things to entice her, or perhaps just kill her, she was pretty pissed off about it. There's a lot of violence in this book due to the main creature that is killing people, ripping them to shreds and eating them. I advise you again to not let the kiddies read these books. They'll end up with nightmares.

The book is still quite the pageturner it was when I first read it, I finished it in a day and started book three, the Circus of the Damned, again. I have read over half of it already and will be posting a review as soon as I have reread it. Yes, I love these books. Honey keeps harassing me to read something new. I will, but for now I want to finish off these books quickly and post the reviews of them. I hope those of you who ran out to by Guilty Pleasures also bought the Laughing Corpse as I recommended, if not, run out and get it today or click on the Amazon box to the right to get your copy through them. There are new versions of these books out with new covers, they are wider, thinner and I really liked the new designs. I hope that if you do take the time to read these books that you enjoy them as much as I have.

Ahh so I finished Circus of the Damned and I am still secure in my love for Laurell's writing. You feel everything that the characters do, when they laugh you may get the giggles, when they cry tears fill your eyes. When they are hurt, you feel their pain and root for them to win over the bad guys.

Edward, known as Death, is after Anita again for the daytime location of where the Master of the City, Jean-Claude, sleeps during the day. What he doesn't know is that Jean-Claude is the Master of the City, so she lies to him and tells him it's someone else, someone who has been leading a pack of vampires and killing innocent humans.

Ok, so the humans they are killing aren't so innocent. They are members of a hate group called Humans Against Vampires and the pack is using them to help turn things back the way it was in the olden days where vampires weren't known about. Even if they could, I think it's a little too late since everyone knows about them, don't you?

Anita meets a vampire who's so old it makes her bones ache, he could possibly be 1 million years old, but no one will truly ever know. He controls snakes and Anita gets to meet a Lamia (half woman/half serpent) creature that tries to turn her against Jean-Claude.

You'll be disappointed in Anita at first with this book, but she comes around and gives a hell of a fight and just about dies trying to help others survive. And oh yeah, Edward uses his trusty flamethrower, you don't want to miss that!

So enjoy Circus of the Damned. Meet the hate groups against vampires and other non-human creatures (they even try to go after Anita). Meet Anita's new partner in animating, Larry, who's so green you'd want to kick him back to the college classes he should be retaking.

As were the first two, the third book of the Anita Blake saga are page turners, again I finished it in a little over a day. I am off to the fourth book for your pleasure, the Lunatic Cafe. Yes, it's a cafe.

I love the new covers that came out with the current prints. Can't decide which ones are my favorite though. Go enjoy Circus of the Damned, already!

Nice name for a cafe, don't you think? The Lunatic Cafe is a haven for shapeshifters to hang out and act like normal humans, but there is nothing normal about them. Anita gets in thick with the local werewolf pack and meets a few other interesting shifters as well, including a swan, who turns out not to be a shifter, but a human cursed by a witch centuries ago.

Shapeshifters are being kidnapped and some are being skinned, others are being hunted, one was killed by their spouse. I never did find out why. Perhaps he couldn't deal with being married to one of the monsters? Lycanthropy is considered a disease, there is no cure, but there is a vaccine. You can get it from a bad batch, just like you could get the flu from a flu shot but at least with the flu shot you wouldn't turn furry once a month.

Jean-Claude is back at it again with Anita as well, sexual harrassment simply doesn't cover the description and I'm shocked she hasn't killed him yet, but then again it is hard to kill someone you love, even if it is only in a dark twisted corner of your heart. He convinces her to allow him to start dating her since she is dating his possible rival, Richard the beta werewolf of the local pack.

There is so much for Anita to deal with, you'd think two men wanting to date her would be enough, but no, she almost gets eaten by one of the weaker members of the pack, she gets to kick some major ass of those who are hunting shapeshifters and she ends up with a certain someone's "pelt" encased in glass on the wall of her living room.

These are the details I can give you without ruining the story. She runs into another immortal creature, witches, and figures out who is making snuff films for Edward to go after. He seems to enjoy being around her being as she provides people, or rather supernatural creatures for him to kill.

Enjoy the violence all you want, be thrilled it isn't real.

Rawhide and Bloody Bones is going to get you if you're a wicked child. And he got them, too.

Anita Blake goes up against more than just your average vampires in this novel, she also goes up against a faerie and a nursery boggle named Rawhide and Bloody Bones. Everything that can go wrong, does. Anita gets captured by the Master of Branson in this story. Jean-Claude isn't strong enough to save her or protect her.

I don't know how to explain this story, it certainly kept me turning the pages. I read it in under 24 hours if you take out the time to eat, shower and sleep. It all starts out as an innocent zombie raising to settle a legal dispute between someone who bought property from a family that didn't own it, yet the court decreed that they did. So if it turned out that the bones dug up during construction were found out to be of a family plot of the people who did own it, the person doing the construction was going to have to buy it all over again, and that isn't going to happen because the family refuses to sell.

The family turns out to have fae blood running through their veins. Anita finds out what it's like to be around a faerie who's attempting to place a glamour on you. Larry's with her in this epic adventure and finds out what it means to work with Anita, not only as an animator, but also as a vampire hunter. It's sad to see him lose his innocence so quickly.

Anita also finds out there's a new quirk to her necomancy that is completely unexpected, although it was rumored possible from ages of old. The power over the dead doesn't just mean human, it means vampire. Anita raises a vampire, completely on accident, but it saved her life all the same. She doesn't get any time at all to even think about how it happened or why after breaking free.

Jean-Claude loses his coffin somehow when he makes the trip to help Anita make overtures to the Master. They steal his coffin because he didn't follow protocol. When he goes to retrieve it they dump it out in front of him from a back, broken and shattered to pieces. Anita sees what it really means to be a vampire during the day. She watches Jean-Claude slowly die as the sun rises and starts to reconsider her theory that vampires truly are dead.

Follow Anita as she tries to catch a killer and pedophile vampire, finds out what death really is, and almost falls into the seduction of Seraphina, Master of the City of Branson and her ghosts. Watch her find the link between a losing battle and defeating Bloody Bones.

I'm almost done reading the next book, the Killing Dance. Review will be up after I finish it.

Anita is on the run in this book, when Edward calls her up and tells her that he just received a contract on her head. After your heart starts beating and you can breathe again he tells her he has turned the contract down. He's decided that since he tends to kill more people around Anita he'd rather keep her alive than kill her and that means he needs to get himself to St. Louis in order to protect her from whatever the man with the money finds to replace him.

Anita almost gets taken out twice. Once in her apartment before the call from Edward, a second time at the new dance club owned by Jean-Claude, Dance Macabre, and again later on in the story by someone she put her trust into and genuinely liked.

Anita survives, so read the book. She sees Richard with his pack, becomes officially his Lupa without becoming a shapeshifter after proving herself to two of the wolves that she is dominant to them. Anita promises to protect them and they return the favor by trying to watch her back during the time of the contract.

Jean-Claude gives his protection to Anita and makes her a guest at the Circus so she will be underground and protected, surrounded by both wolvs and vampires. No hitman would want to go through that many bodies to get to anyone, especially when they all have supernatural strength.

The bond between Richard, Jean-Claude and Anita becomes magical, and not just metaphorically either. They create a triumvirate for the first time in this book between them. Anita becomes closer to Richard and has convinced him to kill Marcus instead of letting him live. She knows Marcus won't back down and will try to play dirty in order to kill him this time around.

There's another triumvirate in town, but I can't give you too many details, as that would give a lot of the story away. Gabriel, the scary were-leopard and Raina, Marcus' Lupa, both make a very horrifying appearance as well. The pages keep turning, the action is non-stop whether Anita is running for her life or falling in love.