Skin Trade: Anita Blake #17

Skin Trade (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #17) - Laurell K. Hamilton

*shrug*

Things I liked about this book: Edward. All the Edward. He remains fantastic. It was also nice seeing Anita actually out working on a murder case for once. How quaint. Also: I quite like Las Vegas, so it was fun seeing the characters run around in Sin City.

Things that drove me nuts: Lack of editing, weird pacing, and repetition plague this book. Hearing the same phrases over and over again to the point where I wanted to start a drinking game. Also, you can't have a character insist, probably about three dozen times, that they are acting A-typically then have them continue to act in that fashion. At a certain point there's just no credibility. And then there is the fact that the pacing is downright bizarre. It starts out glacially slow as the book catalogues every detail and interaction, minute by minute, for the first 450 pages, then falls into numerous sex scenes all back to back, then has about 15 pages of final confrontation (but also, oddly, also sex) and no falling action. It was weird.

This is one of those books that needs to be heavily edited, cut in half, and to have the scenes re-ordered. There is a story in here, it just gets bogged down. It's like Hamilton was trying too hard not to write a book populated entirely by erotica but forgot how to write a mystery. All in all I didn't hate it, but it wasn't a good book by any stretch of the imagination. So yeah, shrug. I'm reading these so you don't have to. ;)