The ninth and first hardcover installment in the bestselling paperback series Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter. At a slightly future date when the FBI and other police organizations admit the existence of vampires, witches, zombies, etc., Anita Blake’s job is to kill monsters—though she considers herself one as well. Anita has been a vampire’s lover, a werewolf’s mate, a zombie queen, and for the past year has been learning ritual magic and methods for animating the dead. Meanwhile, the humorless Anita is quite analytic and tiresomely long-winded; one reads on and on waiting for her to shut up and for something to happen. Finally, Anita is called to Santa Fe by her old monster buddy, Edward, who works under the name “Ted Forrester” as a bounty hunter licensed to kill varmints such as lycanthropes (a legal activity in rancher-run states like New Mexico). Edward is hundreds of years old but as “Ted” is engaged to marry late-thirtyish Donna Parnell, mother of two. Anita is stunned and angry about what she sees as a breach in the monster code, though she too lusts to have an affair with a normal human. Edward/Ted needs Anita’s help on a tough case. He takes her to a hospital where several victims lie flayed but still alive; a serial mutilator has expertly stripped them of their skin and eyelids, leaving no knife marks, then brutally ripped off their noses, penises, testicles, and breasts. How have these meat-naked bodies resisted infection? Who could do such a dastardly thing? The answers, which do not come quickly, bring forward lots of monsters, including a blue-eyed, blond werejaguar who can slip out of his skin and whose wounds heal as fast as a vampire’s. The story takes a long time to get going, but once it does Hamilton sets a good pace and weaves a nifty tapestry of glowy-eyed monsters against a background of blood.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-441-00684-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
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