I was given two of this series' books by a woman selling at the Sanford Flea Market. The second in the series, The Laughing Corpse, and the twelfth in the series, Incubus Dreams. Currently there are 26 novels in this series. I read the Laughing corpse, then tried to read Incubus Dreams. It was a big mistake. Sometimes you can read series novels independently and while Laurell Hamilton does enough background with each character during the novel for it to stand on its own, because I read already another book it was really hard to reconcile the two novels with all the differences in the main character's life between the second and twelfth book. I decided to check them out of the library in order to read them in order and better understand the later books.
This series deals with Anita Blake, she is introduced in the first book, Guilty Pleasures, as an animator, which is someone who can raise the dead, basically Zombies. The novel is set in St. Louis, but reads more like what you would expect New Orleans to feel like. Constantly I think I am reading events happening in New Orleans simply because when you read about voodoo, I just automatically go to New Orleans. In Anita Blake's world, Vampires, Zombies, and Were-anything, have rights. They are allowed to live, if they don't break any laws. Vampires even have their own subculture and district inside the city.
The name Guilty Pleasures is an actual night club where people can go to enjoy vampires in a 'safe' way. Anita Blake offical job is with Animator's Inc. and gets paid to raise zombies for money. The company is on retainer with the local police department and it is always Anita who helps them decipher supernatural cases. The first book centers around a series of vampire killings. As she works with the special task force inside the police department known officially as the Regional Preternatural Investigation Team or RPIT, and unofficially as "the spook squad", she also goes head to head with a master vampire of over a thousand years old in the form of a child who also wants to pay her to figure out the guilty party. The book itself is constant action, The entire story takes place over just a few days in which too many things happen that the reader can hardly keep up and it leaves you so intrigued with not just the story but also the world and the background that you just want to pick up the next novel.
The second book, the Laughing Corpse, deals with a series of murders in which a family is eviscerated by some kind of supernatural creature and eaten. The police ask Anita's help in figuring out who is doing it while she fends off a multimillionaire and the master vampire of the city, both wanting a different thing. The master vampire wants her to become his human servant and the multimillionaire, Harold Gaynor wants her to raise a zombie who is over 300 years old. Her problem with that is the older the zombie the bigger the death needs to be in order to raise the zombie. Recent deaths can be raised by killing a chicken or other such animal. But with a corpse over 300 years old, a human sacrifice is needed. Anita refuses because her ethics wont allow her to kill innocents but Mr. Gaynor refuses to take 'no' for an answer and continues to raise the payout and when that doesn't work, resorts to other tactics that keeps Anita on her toes through the whole novel.
I am now reading Circus of the Damned which was the name of a club in the first novel that she had been taken to several times to meet the Master Vampire of then, which is not the same as the Master Vampire in the second book.
