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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Black Omega" data-source="post: 882209" data-attributes="member: 79">I just finished the new Laurell K. Hamilton book last night.  Random though, I think this is her first book in the Anita Blake series that doesn't have the title related to a place in the book, though I suppose I might have missed it.  The term 'Cerulean Silk'  is used once though.The good is we finally see a return to St. Louis and to Anita Blake's job raising the dead.The bad is that this part takes up five pages, serves to set up a weak payoff, we meet absolutely no one from the office, and after this first five pages, that part of her life is never mentioned again.  I really do miss the good old days when she worked there, talked to people from there, and her life didn't totally revolve around vampires and shifters.The good, we're getting more foreshadowing of things to come instead of stuff simply popping up out of no where.  We now have the Sweet Darkness and Otto lurking out there, waiting to make their returns.The bad, pacing a plot.  The visit of Musette was handled in typical, sex heavy, vampire power games fashion and took up the bulk of the book.  The mystery was very neatly compartmentalized from the rest of the book, barely got any time, and was resolved in a couple of pages.  If you edited it out totally, it would shorten the book about 20 pages and no one would notice.  I suppose it was intended as a change of page, but it reminded me too much of Blue Moon, where the soap opera so overwhelmed the bad guy that he had to do a few terrible things in the last few pages to seem worth killing, and then he goes poof quickly.The strange.  Only a couple of times LKH has totally lost my sense of disbelief.  One was the scene at the end of the first Merry Gentry novel where a literal flood of paparrazi break into her room.  This time it was Anita killing someone in a busy mall.  No matter how I look at the scene, it seems almost senselessly silly, though he puts up such a poor fight, I suppose I should assume they knew what they were doing.It was also a pleasant change of pace that most of the supernatural creatures were not pathetic or co-dependent.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Overall, the book is fun.  It continues to go heavy on the soap opera and the sex, so if you were hoping LKH would move away from that you'll be disappointed.  Anita's adding lovers, not subtracting.From a gaming point of view, it did give me some good ideas on using vampires in my game.  I like the idea of the connection between vampires of certain bloodlines.   The Sweet Darkness feels a little too Ann Rice like, proginator vampires and all, but mixing shifter and vampire is an interesting idea that made sense under the circumstances.</blockquote>

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