Bullet is the nineteen book in the Anita
Blake Vampire Hunter Series by Laurell K. Hamilton. I know I skipped books in
the series, but this book seems so disconnected from the early books in the
series. It was one of the few times I was really disappointed in an author.
I loved the original books in the Anita Blake series (Guilty
Pleasures and Circus of the Damned). Anita is an amazingly strong protagonist
who also had a soft spot. I wanted to be like her. Those early books made me want to gobble up
any of the Anita Blake books despite the order. Hence skipping from book 3 to
book 19. I just wanted more of the strong female character.
Then I started Bullet. First chapter great. There were some
references I didn’t fully get,
but that was easily chalked up to me jumping ahead in the series. I was reading
this in the hotel lobby at a Star Trek convention and was just so absorbed in the
book. So much so that a guy wanted to take my photo of reading this book (and
leaving me with a bit of a mystery and missed connection). Then the book started to get weird.
I didn’t read the
reviews to the book on Amazon or GoodReads.com until after finishing this book.
I didn’t
want someone else to color my perception of the book. Since then I realized
that many people are like me, they hate the direction the series went in.
My beloved series was replaced
from being a fun action driven series filled with magic and dark forces to one I
barely recognized. Now the book was more about sex and fights rather then about
a strong action driven plot that showed complete characters.
I never in my wildest dreams
thought I would be asking how many orgies can there be in one book? I
understand some of the sex was about both control of different wereanimals and
power in general. But it felt superficial and really some of the scenes I would
have liked to cut all together. It felt like that Laurell K Hamilton just
phoned it in and gave a very narrow perception of the paranormal world (which
has really split the readership completely if you read the reviews).
I wished there was better flow
to the book. More thought to what was actually playing out. In many ways, the
book felt like a filler book in a series that fluffed out by a few extra
in-fights and a few extra trips to the ardeur. The book did have a couple big
revelations: Marmee Noir wasn’t dead, the Council was possessed, they needed to
find a new way to stop her since destroying her body wasn’t enough, gold
weretigers still exist and that the blood like of the L’amour Morte was going
to start going crazy and attack cities. This is a lot of stuff to go down. But almost
all of this was filled out through sex and then there was fights fueled by sex
too. In the end it just felt gratituditious. Sure a trip to the ardeur was good
and very useful to move the plot but over half the sex felt silly. Same thing
with half the fights in the book.
In the end I wanted better book.
One that was tightly honed where things didn’t feel silly or too much. Even
some of the descriptions had me going really? I wanted it to be edited better.
Not make it feel like a fluff book that was to just set up the real action in
the next book.
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