Dead Ice (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter), by Laurell K. Hamilton
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Dead Ice (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter), by Laurell K. Hamilton
Free PDF Ebook Dead Ice (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter), by Laurell K. Hamilton
Anita Blake has the highest kill count of any vampire executioner in the country. She’s a U.S. Marshal who can raise zombies with the best of them. But ever since she and master vampire Jean-Claude went public with their engagement, all she is to anyone and everyone is Jean-Claude’s fiancée.It’s wreaking havoc with her reputation as a hard ass—to some extent. Luckily, in professional circles, she’s still the go-to expert for zombie issues. And right now, the FBI is having one hell of a zombie issue.Someone is producing zombie porn. Anita has seen her share of freaky undead fetishes, so this shouldn’t bother her. But the women being victimized aren’t just mindless, rotting corpses. Their souls are trapped behind their eyes, signaling voodoo of the blackest kind.It’s the sort of case that can leave a mark on a person. And Anita’s own soul may not survive unscathed . . .
Dead Ice (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter), by Laurell K. Hamilton - Amazon Sales Rank: #90198 in Books
- Brand: Hamilton, Laurell K.
- Published on: 2015-06-09
- Released on: 2015-06-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.31" h x 1.72" w x 6.31" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 576 pages
Dead Ice (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter), by Laurell K. Hamilton Review “Hamilton remains one of the most inventive and exciting writers in the paranormal field.”—Charlaine Harris“If you’ve never read this series, I highly recommend/strongly suggest having the Anita Blake experience. Vampires, zombies, and shifters, oh my! And trust me, these are not your daughter’s vampires.”—Literati Book Reviews
About the Author Laurell K. Hamilton is a full-time writer and the author of the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter and Merry Gentry series. She lives in a suburb of St. Louis with her family.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
“So, you’re engaged,” Special Agent Brenda Manning said. She wore a black pantsuit with a heavy belt that could wrap around her waist and hold the gun at her side. She was FBI and didn’t have to worry about concealed carry, so the fact that her gun flashed when her suit jacket flared out, which was every time she moved, wasn’t an issue. The gun looked very stark against her white button-down shirt.
“Yep,” I said. My own gun was at the small of my back, underneath a suit jacket made to hide the gun from the clients at my other job. I’d also started getting belt loops added to my skirts so I could wear a belt that could stand up to the weight of a gun and holster. I’d come straight from Animators Inc., where the motto was, “Where the Living Raise the Dead for a Killing.” Bert, our business manager, didn’t believe in hiding the fact that raising the dead was a rare talent, and you paid for talent. But lately my job as a U.S. Marshal for the Preternatural Branch had been taking more and more of my time. Like today.
The other very special agent, Mark Brent, tall, thin, and looking barely old enough to be out of college, was bent over the portable computer they’d brought with them, which was sitting on the room’s only desk. He was dressed in a suit almost identical to Manning’s except his was brown to match his holster, but his gun was still a black bump, stark against his white shirt. We were in the office of our head honcho, Lieutenant Rudolph Storr. Dolph was currently somewhere else, which left me alone with the FBI and Sergeant Zerbrowski. I wasn’t sure which was more dangerous to my peace of mind, but I knew Zerbrowski would mouth off more. He was my partner, my friend, he was entitled. I’d just met Special Agent Manning, and I didn’t owe her my life story.
“The article I read made the proposal sound amazing, like something out of a fairy tale,” Manning said. She smoothed her shoulder-length hair back behind one ear and it stayed put, because it was straight as a board. My own curls would never have behaved that well.
I fought the urge to sigh. If you’re a cop and a woman, never date a celebrity; it ruins your reputation for being a hardass. I was a U.S. Marshal, but ever since we’d gone public with our engagement I’d become Jean-Claude’s fiancée, not Marshal Blake, to most of the women I met, and a lot of the men. I’d really had hopes that the FBI would be above such things in the middle of crime-fighting, but apparently not.
The real problem for me was that the story we told publicly was both true and a lie. Jean-Claude had done the big gesture, but only after he’d proposed in the middle of shower sex. It had been spontaneous and wonderful and messy, and very real. I’d said yes, which had surprised him, and me. I’d figured I just wasn’t the marrying kind of girl. He’d told me then that we’d need to do something to live up to his reputation for the media and the other vampires. They expected their king/president to have a certain flair, and the real proposal was too mundane. I hadn’t understood that flair would include a horse-drawn carriage—yeah, you heard me; he’d actually picked me up in a freaking horse-drawn carriage. If I hadn’t already said yes, and loved him to pieces, I’d have told him not only no, but hell no. Only true love had gotten me to play along with a proposal so grand that trying to imagine a wedding that topped it sort of scared me.
“Oh, yeah, Anita is all into that princess stuff, aren’t you, Anita?” Zerbrowski called from the chair he was half-tipping against the wall. He looked like he’d slept in his suit, complete with a stain on his crooked tie. I knew he’d left his home freshly washed and tidy, but he was like Pig-Pen from the Peanuts comic: Dirt and mess just seemed to be attracted to him within minutes of his walking out of his house. His salt-and-pepper hair was getting more salt and less pepper, and had grown out enough to be all messy curls, which he kept running his hands through. Only his silver-framed glasses were clean, square and gleaming around his brown eyes.
“Yeah, I’m all about that princess shit, Zerbrowski,” I said.
Agent Manning frowned at both of us. “I’m getting the idea that I stepped in something. I was just trying to be friendly.”
“No, you were wanting the princess to talk about how wonderful the prince is, and how he swept her off her feet,” Zerbrowski said, “but Anita is going to disappoint you like she’s disappointed the last dozen women to ask questions about the big romantic gesture.”
I wanted to say, it wasn’t a big romantic gesture, it was a freaking epic romantic gesture and I had hated it. Jean-Claude had loved being able to finally pull out all the stops and just do what, apparently, he’d wanted to do for years while we dated—the whole princely sweep-you-off-your-feet shit. I liked to keep my feet firmly on the ground unless sex was involved, and you can’t really have sex in a horse-drawn carriage; it scares the horses. No, we didn’t try, because we were on freaking camera the whole time. Apparently, there are now engagement coordinators just like there are wedding coordinators, so of course we had a videographer. It had been all I could do to keep from scowling through all of it, so I’d smiled for the camera and so I wouldn’t hurt Jean-Claude’s feelings, but it’s not my real smile, and my eyes in a few frames have that “wait until we’re alone, mister, we are so talking about this” look.
I decided to appeal to Manning’s sisterhood of the badge and said, “Sorry, Agent Manning, but ever since the story went live I’m getting treated more like Jean-Claude’s girlfriend than a marshal, and it’s really beginning to bug me.”
Her face went serious. “I’m sorry, I hadn’t thought about it like that. Years of being one of the guys and building your rep, and I ask you about your engagement first thing.”
“I’ve never seen my partner be so girly about anything as meeting you today, Marshal Blake,” Brent said as he unbent from hunching over the computer. He smiled and it made him look even younger. He seemed fresh-faced and less jaded than the rest of us. Ah, to be bright and shiny again, when you thought you could actually win the fight against evil.
Manning looked embarrassed, which isn’t something you see often in FBI agents, especially not when you’ve just met them.
“Knock it off, Brent,” she said.
He grinned at all of us. “It’s just that we’ve worked together for two years, and I’ve never seen you squee over anything.”
“It’s the horse-drawn carriage,” Zerbrowski said. “Chicks dig that kind of shit.”
“Not this chick,” I said, quietly under my breath.
“What did you say?” Manning asked.
“Nothing. Is the video ready, Agent Brent?” I asked, hopeful we could actually do our jobs and leave my personal life out of it.
“Yes,” he said, but then his smile faded around the edges, and I saw the beginnings of the bright and shiny rubbing off. “Though after you see it we may all be game to talk about carriages and pretty, pretty princesses.”
It was another first, an FBI agent admitting that something bothered him. For them to admit it out loud, it had to be bad. I suddenly didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to add another nightmare to the visuals I had in my head. I was a legal vampire executioner and raised zombies as my psychic talent; I had plenty of scary shit in my head and I so didn’t need more, but I stayed in my chair. If Manning and Brent were tough enough to watch it multiple times, I could sit through it once. I couldn’t let the other badges think that getting proposed to by the vampire of my dreams made me one bit less tough. I couldn’t let myself believe it, either, though a part of me did. How could someone who let a man lead her into a Cinderella carriage carry a gun and execute bad guys? It made even my head hurt, thinking about it.
Zerbrowski said what I was thinking. “I thought the Feds never admitted anything bothered them.”
Agent Brent shook his head and looked tired. Lines showed around his eyes that I hadn’t seen before and made me add between three to five years onto his age. “I’ve worked in law enforcement for six years. I’d thought I’d seen it all, until this.”
I did the math in my head and realized he had to be nearly thirty, which was how old I was, but I’d used up my shininess years ago.
“I thought this was just another big bad preternatural citizen gone wrong,” I said.
“Not exactly,” he said.
“I don’t like mysteries, Agent Brent. I’m only here on this little information out of courtesy to the FBI, and because Lieutenant Storr requested it.”
“We appreciate that, Marshal, and we wouldn’t have had you walk into this blind if we didn’t feel that the fewer people who know the details, the better off we’re going to be,” Brent said.
“Awesome,” I said, “but the foreplay is getting a little tiresome; there’s no one in the room but the four of us, so what is on the video?”
“Are you always this cranky?” Manning asked.
Zerbrowski laughed out loud and didn’t even try to hold it in. “Oh, Agent Manning, this isn’t even close to cranky for my partner.”
“We heard that about her, and you’re right, Blake. I did come in here expecting the proposal to have softened that reputation. I didn’t think I had that much girl left in me, and if I’m assuming that it softened you up, then your male colleagues must be making your life . . . difficult.”
It was my turn to laugh. “That’s one way of putting it, but honestly it’s the whole engaged-to-a-vampire thing that’s making some of my fellow officers doubt whose side I’m on.”
“Vampires are legal citizens now, with all the rights that entails,” she said.
“Legally, yeah, but prejudice doesn’t go away just because a law changes.”
“You’re right about that,” she said. “In fact, some at the bureau thought we shouldn’t include you in this case because of your proclivity to date the preternatural.”
“Proclivity, that’s polite; so what made you decide to trust me?”
“You still have the highest kill count of any vampire executioner in the United States, and only Denis-Luc St. John has more rogue lycanthrope kills than you.”
“He raises Troll-Hounds; they’re the only breed of dog ever raised specifically to hunt supernatural prey. It makes him the king of tracking through wilderness areas, after shapeshifters.”
“Are you implying that the dogs make him better at the job, or that he’s somehow cheating by using them?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Neither, just a statement of fact.”
“Now that Anita has passed muster, and I’m included because I’m her friend, show us some skin, agents, or stop teasing,” Zerbrowski said.
“Oh, you’ll see skin,” Brent said, and he looked older again, as if this case in particular were rubbing the shine away.
“What the hell is on the video, Agent Brent?” I asked.
“Zombie porn,” Brent said, and hit the arrow in the middle of the screen.
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502 of 541 people found the following review helpful. “I’m Anita Blake.” By E. A Solinas One of the worst things to ever happen to the Anita Blake series was that Laurell K. Hamilton received a coveted "no-edit" clause in her contract. Even if the books were bloated, tedious, repetitive trainwrecks.And the best parts of "Dead Ice" are the ones that clearly show the mark of an editor's scarlet pen. But while it starts strong, the book quickly sinks into a clammy, dismal quagmire of relationship issues, few of which are actually even slightly interesting to read about. Instead, we get long stretches of Anita being the toughest, manliest, most misogynistic macho-man in the universe, broken only by a disturbing subplot that heralds future necrophilia.The FBI enlists Anita to help them on a case that really shouldn't be new to them: someone is raising zombies so they can be molested in porn videos. This doesn't surprise Anita, since she has encountered such plots in the past -- but the Internet is bringing a new dimension to such things. That plot sounds exciting, interesting and chilling... so it is set aside for almost the entire book. Not kidding.Instead, we follow Anita as she shops for jewelry, has sex in cars, plans who's going to be in her mass commitment ceremony, and has useless power struggles that nobody cares about to show us how she is tougher/sexier/cooler/better than everyone else. And, of course, everybody sits down to eat bland food like a "family," and talk about relationships. Hooray. Occasionally we dip back into the zombie-porn plot, only to be dragged back into Anita yelling at random new characters.In a way, "Dead Ice" is the most disappointing book Hamilton has written in years, because the beginning is... good. It has the subtle touch of a good editor who has streamlined out all the filler and repetition, and the FBI agents are written as reasonable human beings who have legitimate issues with Anita. Add on a zombie case that is horrifyingly plausible, and a rather clever connection to one of the earlier novels... and you have the makings of an actual good Anita Blake thriller.And then... it just sinks into the same ol' same ol'. Most of the book is a poorly-written filler, full of with ghastly dialogue ("How can any of us stand near the flame of your beauty and not want to be closer to the heat of it?") and power struggles that nobody really cares about. It feels less like a cohesive novel, and more like a string of short stories and vague ideas tacked together, with the "main" plot being forgotten for what seems like an eternity.Of course, we have the usual Anita Blake staples: sexism (Anita has to LEARN that sometimes women don't give men a "reason" to beat them), preaching the gospel of the gym, unsexy sex scenes (Anita picking pubic hair out of her teeth), logical plot holes (Micah is now a wereleopard AND weretiger), casual insults to people of various sexualities (an asexual person is "cured" by Anita and JC) and long scenes that exist just to glorify Anita. One scene involves a character comparing Anita's looks to those of Helen of Troy... without an ounce of humor. That is the stuff of parody.Worst of all: Anita raises a zombie for the first time in aeons, while being her usual unprofessional self. Instead of somehow tying this into the zombie porn plot... it turns into a necrophiliac romance based on Anita raising zombies who are practically alive. This means in another two or three books, Anita will raise a zombie and have sex with it. Just wait and watch. And as the final embarrassment, Hamilton wrote part of this as a rather pitiful jab at Jim Butcher's "Dresden Files" series.Anita is her usual self here -- a dumb, thuggish bully who loathes anyone she considers "weak" or too "PC." Hamilton tries desperately to cast her as a goddess of kindness and strength, but only makes her look like a clueless bimbo who throws tantrums all the time. Oh, and there are some halfhearted attempts to make her seem less violently misogynistic ("Girls rule; boys drool") but she's still casually misogynistic and resentful of all other women.As for the hundreds of other characters, they mostly seem to be there to fill up space. Anita's brainwashed boytoy Nicky is there just to remind us that he's a sociopath every two pages, which is dull at best. Asher is just there to be told how much everyone hates him. Jean-Claude is barely present in the story, and Hamilton's boredom with the character is almost palpable. And Anita's rapist/true-love Micah is secretly manipulating different were groups to enhance his own power base... and fortunately for him, Anita is too stupid to be worried about this."Dead Ice" is a hideously frustrating book. When the editors were involved, it's a pretty decent thriller... but most of the time, it's the same old swamp of bickering and whining. Alert to the editor: give the whole book the red-pen treatment!
289 of 316 people found the following review helpful. If 90% of the book was cut it might be good... By Cal Maybe 10 chapters worth reading, the other 50 or so should have been cut and burned.It is actually kind of tragic how far Hamilton has fallen, and the ever increasingly desperate and pathetic efforts of her diminished but weirdly loyal fan base is starting to get pretty sad. Actually there's a growing suspicion that Hamilton pays for good reviews to artificially pump up her star rating (whether she does actually do it isn't clear, but there are certainly growing rumors), for support of those suspicions I'd suggest that you count how many 5 star reviews are less than 40-50 words. Hamilton is mostly getting good reviews from fans who can't muster up more than a couple sentences to express their love for this series. Heck there's a review that is literally one word. Many of the rest are more about how long the reader has loved Hamilton's work with nothing at all to say about this book. Very few reviews actually reference this book at all, not even to explain what it is was about it they liked. Talk about red flags for a series in trouble. If Hamilton isn't paying for the ridiculous reviews, I can only imagine her fans think they are actually helping her with their joke reviews. What kind of real fan doesn't want to talk at length about what they love? Even the people who were once fans, half the series ago, who thought it had potential before Hamilton started buying into her own ongoing attempts to mythologize her own life and destroyed it all show more passion for a series they hate than Hamilton's biggest fans do. This series has become garbage, and the only people who really show much passion about that aren't Hamilton's fans. Think about it. (Of course making fun of the series is a lot more fun than actually reading it is, the series and the author are so pompously self important now that they are often unintentional comedy gold.) Oh, and before someone repeats the tired, don't like it don't read it argument, hate isn't the worst reaction something can get. Apathy is. Once people stop caring at all, that's the worst reaction. Most of the haters aren't apathetic, they just find different things interesting, like laughing at Hamilton's writing and the people who think it is the best ever.The problem with Dead Ice, beyond the usual deterioration of Hamilton's writing, is there's really two books here, and they are disastrously smooshed into one. One of the books shows hints that with some serious editor intervention that Hamilton might actually be able to again write a decent story one day, the other one is such a colossal waste of paper that it's embarrassing that anyone gives this ongoing soap opera a five star review. If the entire second book had been cut, this book would be significantly smaller, but significantly better for it. It would probably have been the first thing Hamilton has written in more than a decade that is actually worth reading. Too bad it makes up such a small fraction of the resulting book.The first book is about a crime, that Anita Blake, (the world's most powerful, and apparently desirable moron) vampire hunter extraordinaire, is the only one who can help the FBI solve. Someone is raising zombies with souls in them to film exploitation porn for the net, and even the all knowing Anita only knows one person now dead, other than herself who could do it. The crime itself and the investigation into it is actually fairly lame by the end, but there's lot of hints that the FBI and the rest of the law enforcement world see Anita very differently that she or even Hamilton see her, which is very welcome. Anita is a necromancer, one of the few who survive to develop their powers, she's having sex with about 20 members of the local supernatural community (the very community she is expected to police) in St. Louis to feed a magical curse that neither Anita nor Hamilton seem to have any interest in actually getting a handle on, she is magically linked to the King of all the vampires in North America, Jean Claude, (though when the heck this happened is never actually shown on paper in any of the books), as well as the leader of the local werewolf pack, though Richard hasn't really been seen in a dozen books or so in favor of the pod version. She's also linked to her one time rapist, and apparently the leader of an ever growing portion of the shapeshifters of the North America, Micah (which again mostly happens off screen), along with several kinds of pointless men (including a mind controlled slave, a manipulative submissive, and a teenager) who manage her life because Anita is far to stupid to do it herself. To say she has divided loyalties and questionable motivations is an understatement, assuming you could get Anita to understand the idea that the fact she's more and more like a mob boss is a bad thing to everyone she isn't sleeping with. For example, one of her new sweeties, is effectively a magically enslaved freak of nature who "loves" her without ever having a say in it, and she sees nothing wrong with this. The Anita from the first 8 books or so would see the new Anita as something that had to be hunted and killed for the greater good.The second and sadly much larger book is mostly about the never ending soap opera that is Anita's life as she pinballs from one pointless event to another begging for people to explain even the most simplistic concepts to her, and forcing almost everyone she knows to constantly reinforce her paper thin sense of self worth. Whole events are set up and then forgotten about as Anita gets distracted by the latest angst ridden disaster. The cast has become bloated to the point of insanity, most of the characters receive little to no real development or personality, and it feels like they all just come to a stop once Anita leaves the room. Most of Anita's personal life is divided between angst and melodrama on the one hand, and snide angry bitchiness on the other. Characters often exist purely to tell her how amazing she is and to be pretty mannikins for the readers who like this trash to drool over, or to give Anita an excuse to be angry and insulting, and frequently extremely hypocritical to. Most of it could and should have been edited out of the book, because it kills any sense of forward momentum and accomplishes pretty much nothing. Anita has literally been whining about these same issues for the last ten books, and is still far to selfish, far to stupid, and far to angry to actually deal with any of it in a mature fashion. A lot of the wasted paper is based on the fact Anita lacks even the slightest clue how to be a professional, there's an entire sub plot about being hired to raise a zombie for a group of historians that accomplishes little more than allowing Anita to be snide to people for mistakes that are her fault to begin with. The fact this whole mess happens in one of the longest nights ever described just makes it even worse. Seriously, the entire book takes place over about a two day period, about 70% of which happens before 6am the first night. This second book fills the lions share of the book (only about 10 chapters have anything to do with the crime, the rest, about 50 chapters is just filler), killing any development the more interesting zombie crime story makes. There are huge blocks of twenty or more chapters where the story the book is supposed to be about, and is described in the blurb and the marketing is completely forgotten about. It is also pretty clear that Hamilton no longer writes her books in a coherent linear fashion, since Anita routinely forgets things that have happened only minutes before, or rehashes entire conversations not minutes later. And Hamilton seems to have forgotten even more about the rules of her setting works because she routinely just makes up new ideas on the fly that contradict her earlier works.There are ideas here worth developing, but only in the hands of a different author. Hamilton isn't aware enough to even notice them when they happen, and is to invested in making her self insert avatar the queen of everything to actually deal with the fact Anita is really the biggest and worst monster in the series. (This might sound hyperbolic, but Hamilton admits to not knowing for sure if things she's written even made it into the books, or are just in her head, a lot of major developments seem to have happened off screen as a result.) Micah for example has been actively dominating other shifter groups in his spare time, killing or sleeping his way into more and more followers (something Anita and jean Claude are barely even aware of), while he's also shifting his own people into positions of power inside Jean Claude's organization while removing members of groups he doesn't control. In the hands of a better writer, Micah, who should always have been a villain, and not Anita's new number one sweetie, would be angling for the throne, but he loves Anita so much, and Hamilton won't ever kill off characters that Anita loves, so it's probably nothing. The FBI are increasingly coming to see Anita as a dangerous threat, but Anita just sees it as them being jealous of her personal life, or how much more manly she is than they are. In the hands of a better author it would be clear that Anita is becoming corrupted, and is not the lily white good with god heroine she thinks she is (Anita literally has an angel watching out for her, and has basically been shown that the Christian god approves of her choices). Unfortunately Hamilton ceased to be the kind of writer who could actually inflict real consequences on her heroine half this series ago, and now she just wants to contrive ever more silly collections of pretty men for her main character to sleep with while she preaches about her own new found self righteousness on the subject of polyamory. A big chunk of this books is actually the quest for even more people to add to the rota for Anita's ever expanding collection of bed partners, or adding a couple new girlfriends for Anita so the guys won't have to wait so long between chances for sex. While sex itself is toned down, it has become basically the dominating motivation for everyone in Anita's eyes.If you liked the first 8 or so books and have hated everything since, this books is probably going to be infuriatingly bad to you. If you think all the pointless melodrama and soap opera garbage is the best thing you have ever read and Hamilton is thus the best author you've ever read, you'll probably like this addition to the ongoing travesty that is the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Series. You have my condolences, because the genre is really to big now to waste time on books this bad, and if you where a bit more adventurous you'd probably know it. To Hamilton, it's to bad that 90% of this series ended up published, chances are if the books where all pared down to bare essentials and all the relationship filler was dropped the series would be much better for it.
71 of 74 people found the following review helpful. The Good News: Someone Edited This One ***SPOILERS*** By Danielle N. Hart The bad news is... editing didn't help enough. Honestly, I feel as if maybe LKH should look into doing some more short stories or novella-length works (for compilation in a collection) because I don't feel like she can really carry a full novel anymore. There were parts of this that were good, and that reminded me of earlier Anita, but there was also a LOT of bad bad bad stuff in it.Spoiler-free review: If you can't get enough of the never-ending relationship drama, you may enjoy this one. If you picked it up because of "the old Anita's back" vibes, you probably won't.There are ***SPOILERS *** in this review. You have been warned.1. LKH appears to have abandoned her distaste for using actual anatomical (crude ones, but still) terms as opposed to constant references to "his body" and "me" - as long as they're being used to insult/belittle someone, including one use of the four-letter word beginning with D for male reproductive organs in a scene that's really distasteful. LKH's use of different words than other authors for sexual climax (the whole "go" instead of "come") remains unchanged, however. The s*x scenes remain pretty vague and Anita has still not figured out that you can get long-wearing lipstick.2. A lot of plot elements draw on The Laughing Corpse, one of the earliest books. There is enough information if you haven't actually read that one to get the info you need for the plot, which is good.2b. There's also a TON of unneeded rehash of other issues and phrasing throughout the book, which is not so good. Plenty of refs to stuff that readers know and characters SHOULD know, such as the whole "Anita raises her dead dog" story, and "Anita raises the college prof" story.3. LKH's legal setup still makes no real sense, either on law enforcement agencies or how the legal framework is set up to be either super lenient or super punitive. LKH also refers to Anita as "a cop" NUMEROUS times, which with all due respect, she is NOT.4. LKH's timeline aren't well done. Several places in the book have confusion as to whether Anita is 30 or 31, and despite the fact that only 7 or 8 years of book time have passed, she uses "hip" updated jargon, such as "frenemy" which doesn't really fit. Especially since Anita clearly has no time to watch TV or read anything. Also, when she talks about Dominga not realizing there was a market for online zombie porn - probably not when the books she appeared in was written, but in a world where Anita refers to people as "frenemies", I don't see how she couldn't.5. The awkward "I gave X "wide eyes", "cop face" phrase is alive and all too well in the book.6. A lot of filler dialogue about zombie raising stuff that has no real impact.7. Plenty of ego-stroking for Anita and the whole "I'm so not pretty" self-image problem she has now. I liked Anita a lot better when she was a realistically depicted woman who didn't really worry about how she looked all the time. However, LKH takes it to a new level with a Helen of Troy comparison.8. After the whole deal about naming the jewelry store, it is only actually named in the author's notes.9. One section that was distasteful concerns an older vampire's servant: "It had been somewhere in what would be the Middle East today, but I think had been Mesopotamia then, yeah, as in the cradle of civilization. She gave her name as Irene; I doubted it had been her birth name, but I’d learned that it was rude to ask a vampire or human servant’s original name. Whatever name they came with was their name. I guess you can’t go through centuries being mud-dabble-wat-wat, so Irene it was." Luckily, it's in her internal monologue, but still.10. The whole "murder victim as zombie" gets a lot of play, but is sort of revealed to be one of those concepts that's not fleshed out enough.11. Anita's running theme of being unfairly disrespected in her professional life due to her personal life gets a workout here in a way that makes it clear LKH doesn't really get how things work. We learn Anita has been a plant in the strip club performances as the "lady victim" and getting up on stage (not stripping, although LKH implies that she has in one of the other books) and not really seeing a problem with doing so - however, the Marshals don't seem thrilled. Also, the fact that her various men don't really take agreements like "no making out on the job" seriously doesn't help either. Finally, if Anita is tired of being judged by the clothes that Nate picks out for her, then she should stop judging other people on theirs (and by judge, I mean "decide what you think their whole personality is").12. The whole king/queen/royalty fixation the vamps and shifters have developed is annoying, especially with Anita remarking on how Americans like equality.13. So apparently now Animators Inc (remember them?) has handouts that clients are supposed to read, which means Anita gets irritable at any questions. Personally, I'm surprised that there's not a lot more paperwork, mandatory videos, etc involved in the whole process. Also this historical group that wanted the zombie raised all seem not so bright. They take the zombie to Denny's for a snack, for crying out loud.14. The middle of the book "zombie raising" plot has interesting moments, but it doesn't really fit with anything else. It basically exists to point out that Anita is better than everyone else, even if she doesn't know how she's doing what she's doing... And it introduces a bit of tech and practice that seems totally NOT A GOOD IDEA with the required twists and turns to make it fit.15. Why do the shifters care about carbs? It's not like they have human metabolisms...16. Some of the shifters (including the oh-so-perfect Micah) discover they can have more than one beast.17. Lots and lots and lots of relationship drama details that are not necessary.18. The end bit where they bring the main plot back in (and tie it to something that's totally obvious) is okay, but Anita just looks less than bright in it. If someone identifies himself as "X's son", and your reply is "W and X only have one son", and he repeats that with emphasis on the W and X part, how many brain cells does it take to figure out that X has another kid (whether they know or not). LKH's desire to write more than necessary just makes Anita look not smart in this scene.19. Traditional Anita Blake epilogue where everything is brushed under the rug and it's made clear that despite all the emotional dramas, there have been no changes to the status quo.
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Dead Ice (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter), by Laurell K. Hamilton
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