Laurell K. Hamilton’s newest Anita Blake novel, Cerulean Sins is out in a few months. Link leads to the first couple chapters of the book if you just can’t wait.

I obviously can wait, since there’s at least three Hamilton hardbacks floating around the house that I haven’t bothered with yet. (My consumption of Hamilton’s stuff has always fluctuated in direct proportion to the amount of time I was stuck in hotel rooms on business trips with nothing to do.)

The Anita Blake stuff suffers from (a) Hamilton pandering to the bodice-ripper set, especially the ones who like it (to read about it, at least) a bit rough, and (b) having only one story (Anita lets her personal code get her into committing to protect some folks, which means she has to go through some bad shit and descend further into the Abyss) and therefore needing to ratchet up the Horror and Sex a notch each time.

Reread the first four or five books -- they're better written, the characters are more interesting, and Anita's display of a deus ex machina hitherto-unknown power doesn't grate nearly as much.

They're still fascinating, in a car-wreck-at-the-side-of-the-road way. But I wait for the paperbacks.

I completely enjoyed that last major paperback -- Obsidian Butterfly, since it took everything down a notch, with practically no sex (at least for Anita) and no gawdawful powers and lots and lots of my favorite character, Edward/Ted.

At the end of the book, they included a teaser for the next book that, according to Jackie, must have been from very nearly the end of the novel and gave quite a bit away which (a) lessened my need to read it and (b) pissed me off because of the banality of it.

She strings together some good scenes, really, and I certainly can't point fingers at someone for (re)writing the same basic story. I just need to be in a mood to read her and I haven't been in a while.

Actually, the one after that is available in paperback, too. But I liked Obsidian Butterfly, largely because of the different setting, not to mention, natch, Edward.

My roommate got me started on those books a couple years ago. They started out as cheesy fun but have since become an exercise in endurance. I couldn't even make it through Narcissus in Chains; sex among the supernatural can not sustain a 432 page book if there's no plot to back it up.

_The Laughing Corpse_ was good. The sex is getting boring even for the borderline porn. The worst part about it is that her Meredith Gentry series has some incredibly _neat_ ideas about Faery...

...and the first book has 18 pages (hardback) that don't mention sex or sexual situations.

And I never thought my speed reading abilities for alt.sex.moderated would ever come into play.

Erm.

(Reviewed _Narcissus_ over at Julia's Pop Culture blog.)