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Bullet

Laurell K. Hamilton

Published 2010        384 pages

Reviewed by Ania Tyburska

Summary (from the book jacket)

My name is Anita Blake and I am back in St Louis and trying to live a normal life - as normal as possible for someone who is a legal vampire executioner and a US Marshal. I have my lovers, my friends and their children, school programs to attend. In the midst of all this ordinary happiness a vampire from my past reaches out. She was supposed to be dead, killed in an explosion, but the Mother of All Darkness is the first vampire, the dark creator, and it's hard to kill a god. She has reached out to me here - in St Louis, home of everyone I love most. She has decided she has to act now or never, to control me, and all the vampires in America.

The Mother of All Darkness believes that the triumvirate created by master vampire Jean-Claude with me and the werewolf Richard Zeeman has enough power for her to regain a body and to emigrate to the New World. But the body she wants to possess is already taken; I'm about to learn a whole new meaning to sharing my body, one that has nothing to do with the bedroom. And if the Mother of All Darkness can't succeed in taking over my body for herself, she means to see that no one else has the use of it, ever again. Even Belle Morte, not always a friend to me, has sent word: 'Run if you can …'

The Review

Some time ago books by Laurell K. Hamilton crossed this precarious line that divides urban fantasy from erotica. They should work pretty good in this new genre. They fulfill most of the requirements. Practically nonexistent plotline. Multiple characters, all entangled in various romantic constellations and pages and pages of quite relentless sex. But here is the thing. As far as erotica goes, the last installment in the Anita Blake series leaves you cold.

Bullet is a minute-to-minute transcript of few days in Anita Blake’s freaky household. She fights some metaphysical danger, she does some remote police work and she does various man in her life. New characters come and go, making it fairly impossible to ascertain who is good, who is bad or who just dropped by for a quicky. If you have never encountered one of Anita Blake’s novels before, you would be completely lost in the maze of names and references to episodes from other books after few initial pages.

I had the pleasure of reviewing several Laurel K. Hamilton books and my basic thoughts remain the same after reading Bullet. Somewhere deeply hidden there still is this magic that made Guilty Pleasures one of my favorite urban fantasy novels of all times. There is this commitment to the psychological truth of characters and willingness to show how twisted and warped can relationships get. I might not be a fan of ongoing discussions about feelings, but strangely enough they kept me glued to this book. Cut the sex, bring in some good ol' ass kicking and Bullet could be a real page-turner.

So here is a suggestion. Would it be possible for Laurell K. Hamilton to start it all over? Create a new heroine. One that has not yet chewed over all her “beliefs”, that she sounds like a broken record. Keep the carefully created universe with all the power games between different species. Let loose the twisted sense of humor that makes the brutal and gruesome scenes strangely ambivalent. Begin a new series. One that would not loose its way between the numerous characters, which at that point do nothing more than act as props for the orgies. And I can promise I would keep reading.

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