This book started out well. After reading [b:Hit List|8935153|Hit List (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #20)|Laurell K. Hamilton|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1315176487s/8935153.jpg|13811777],I thought Anita was back on track. I was getting tired of books full of nothing but sex. I was ready for Anita to get back to kicking vampire butt. The first half of Kiss the Dead was police work, if a little slow. Then suddenly, Anita is having discussions about romance and love-lives with other cops. What? Then the last part of the book is all sex. We were so close to getting our old Anita back. I do like that Anita is finally happy and is almost past the drama of "I can't be in love! I can't be happy! Too many people love me and want me to be happy!" And it's always a good book when we don't have to put up with Richard's crap. ( )

Kiss the Dead is the 21st book in the Anita Blake series and it is everything that we’ve come to expect of Anita and her “sweeties”. That isn’t really a compliment. This series has become predictable and boring. Kiss the Dead doesn’t deviate from the Anita Blake formula in any way. This book has Anita arguing about and defending her lifestyle (polyamory, loving weres and vampires) to the people she works with. The arguments are the same: trite, nearly incoherent, and repetitive.

For the rest of the review head over to:

http://fictionnecessary.tumblr.com/post/24687506736/kiss-the-dead-laurell-k-hami... ( )

I don't know why I keep reading these books. Nothing happens any more. ( )

Anita Blake is back – and this one merges the early Blake (all thriller/murder-mystery) with the later Blake (all sex alla time) in an interesting balancing act. I’m pleased that she continues to develop as a character (although thank goodness, no more manifesting new animals to call this time around) – will her constantly evolving powers never cease? And how do the less powerful feel under her boots? She’s thinking about that a lot. ( )

Not a bad book in the Anita Blake series, but once again a great plot idea disappeared to reemerge to get wrapped up in the last 30 pages. The middle was all about Anita and her problems juggling so many men in her life. Boo-hoo.

The sex scenes were okay. At least they weren't all about violence and how Anita wants to bite the throbbing pulse and tear out someone's neck. But the entire middle of the book was dull. Arguments with Asher, him hurting Anita. So much of this doesn't make sense. It's just a device to make them have to send Asher away to see if he'll fit and maybe become master of his own city. I suspect this is to set him up as a bad guy at some point--a Big Bad Guy. Now that the Mother of All Darkness is truly dead, Anita needs other more worthy opponents.

The idea of pacifist vampires who don't want to be blood-oathed to any vampire because they want to be free ... Vampires who are very young and very old and not perfectly gorgeous makes for all sorts of interesting moral questions, especially since vampires who are turned too young (like before puberty go mad eventually.

Spoilers!!

As much as Anita whines and dissects her love life and relationships, this wasn't delved into at all. These new vampires kill cops and do some other bad things that the vampires who made them say they didn't know about. They are let go to rethink the idea of not blood-oathing new vampires. And ta-da. That's it. This could have made for some really great stuff, but no.

Sigh. The fact that it all wrapped up so fast at the end was a big disappointment.

I do have the next book, so I guess I'll read that next. I'm debating trying to see what books coming up have Edward in them and just reading those, or maybe just stop reading the series altogether. ( )