Laurell K. Hamilton

I’ve been a fan of Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series since 1998, when I spied a copy of The Lunatic Cafe on the shelf at the Barnes and Noble in Sioux Falls. Of course, I immediately had to go back and read the rest of the novels in the series, which was, at the time, only four books long.

Now, eight books later, I’m still addicted to Hamilton’s cast of characters and soft-porn storytelling, but I wish there was a little bit more story in this offering, Incubus Dreams.

To be fair, it is a transitional novel, and it does that job well. Anita, in this incarnation, is finally beginning to make peace with who and what she is. In fact, for the first time, she’s beginning to show real signs of maturity.

The plot, what there is of it, isn’t very obvious – there’s a string of murders, of course, but there are vast stretches of the novel where they’re not even mentioned, and the solution, when it comes, is sort of a throwaway, but the character development is much more interesting – Nathaniel is becoming three-dimensional, and Richard is ‘back’ in a sense.

I’m looking forward to finding out what happens next.