To be clear, this is not the worst book I’ve ever read. It might well be the worst book I’ve ever finished, though. I’d try to make a case for the fact that I’ve been in a poor mood the last week or two, but the fact is, I hated it and nearly quit reading long before the mood started. If I was in jail on a deserted island and this was the only book available, I might have to renounce literacy. Let this be a warning to you.

The funny part is, I was praising the last book for being so much more on target than the couple before it. The way this was accomplished, I have since realized, was by taking our Anita out of her home turf, out of the range of her various boyfriends, and putting her somewhere completely different with a man with whom she has only a strictly professional relationship, and helping him solve a mystery. How did I realize this, you ask? By virtue of the fact that Narcissus in Chains is the exact opposite of that book in practically every way.

Anita returns home, ready (thanks to some unfortunate lessons learned in New Mexico) to come to terms with her relationships with vampire and werewolf, both emotionally and parapsychologically, I guess. (They share some kind of power between them, you see.) In the process of doing so, she discovers just how badly the things she has been ignoring in her life for the past six months have collapsed and goes about setting them right. Meanwhile, there are plenty of new players in town to create distractions and complications for all concerned. Plus, a little fraction of a mystery? Sort of? As has happened before, I’m willing to admit that everything tied up much more neatly than I had expected, in the last 40 pages or so. But that’s pretty cold comfort. It’s fine for Anita to not see the strings connecting everything together, but after enough times that I can’t as a reader, it starts to become an exercise in futility. I’m simply not paranoid enough for these books, I guess. All I know is, the mystery part seemed so backburnered that by the time the bad guy was revealed as having tried to kill Anita twice before, I had no idea who they were referring to, and couldn’t find any indication of it at a couple of earlier points in the book that I thought might be applicable. And then, sure, a few pages later, I figured out what they meant. But somehow, that seems like a pretty bad sign. This is all I’m saying.

Apparently, I have read nine Anita Blake books over the past year and a half. That seems like kind of a lot, although the year and a half part brings it back down to reasonable levels. Here’s the awesome thing, though. For the first time in a little while, I really liked this one. In Obsidian Butterfly, Anita is called upon by her mysterious assassin friend, Edward, to join him in New Mexico for an old-fashioned creature hunt. They, a Native American bodyguard-for-hire, and a misogynistic German serial killer must all join forces with the local police and the Feds to track down a creature that is killing a lot of people, and skinning but leaving alive a lot of other people. Since Anita Blake’s bread-and-butter is killing the vampires, the demons, the forces of darkness… well, okay, that’s somebody else. But Anita does it too, generally speaking. If you’re unaware of her, she’s this book series chick who raises zombies to ask them questions, and sidelights as a legal vampire executioner, whenever they get too uppity and outside the law. And those skills translate into hunting down were-creatures, witches and other spellcasters, fairies, and all the other non-mythical creatures that inhabit her Earth and go rogue from time to time.

So of course I’d like that, except that lately the series has run to vamporn more than detective-y awesomeness. Which is what made this book so much better than lately. All of the ‘Who will I choose?’/’Getting my hump on is immoral, but he’s so dreamy!’/’Check out this awesome new power I have thanks to my ongoing relationships!’ stuff has been put on hold, to settle into an old-fashioned investigation and hunt. It’s possible that this reset to the early series values marks a Vampire Hunter renaissance, and I’m really going to like the next few books? It’s a nice thought.

Especially because the editing was atrocious, and having to deal with that in addition to lame storyline will make me very sad. The badness was due to repetition. If there’s one thing I really understand about this book, it’s which people have empty eyes signifying that their soul has eroded away. Because I was told about it on an average of once or twice per chapter, spread out among a very few number of characters. And this book has 60 or 70 chapters, just so we’re clear. But even worse than that are the moments when Anita monologues internally about her opinion on this person’s motives or that person’s effectiveness, and then speaks those thoughts aloud (presenting them almost exactly the same way she thought them) to some character or other that was in the room with her when she was thinking to herself, all on the same page. Speaking as someone who can maintain attention to the plot for longer than 90 seconds at a time, this was an exercise in pain. It’s possible that this speaks to just how much I enjoyed the plot, that I was only rolling my eyes at the prose rather than having it make me want to claw them out.

I had this whole big plan, I remember distinctly. Stay away from the vampire nearly-porn stuff for a little while. Alternate between the stack of hardbacks and the stack of graphic novels, knock out several reviews in a reasonably short time as a result. And, okay, the last part is likely to occur, or at least no less likely. But the problem with being on a plane (aside from all the motherfucking snakes, I mean) and not checking any bags is that it’s not worth it to try to bring along an unwieldy and damageable graphic novel when you could bring along a cheap paperback instead. And so, regrettably, I have read another tale of the exploits of Anita Blake.

Regrettable is an easy word to throw around in this context. For one thing, the vampire porn classification is getting to be more overt with each one I read. On the inside, sure, obviously, but I’m talking about the covers. Time was, I could pretend like it was detective fiction that happened to include the undead, and all was well. But it’s just really obviously porn to even casual passersby at this point. My street cred, always a precarious proposition at best, is taking a real hit lately. And then (getting back to the book’s steamy innards) the porniness quotient, vampire and otherwise, has risen as steeply as I was afraid it would after the last one. If the descent continues, it will be a romance novel next time, and the one after that should have its own special section in the used bookstore where the children can’t reach it.

Here’s the bad news, though. The paragraphs above do not contain my largest complaint about Burnt Offerings. Sure, okay, I was able to buy into it when our heroine graduated from ‘able to raise zombies’ to full on necromancer, with power over all of the dead. And I thought it was kind of cool in the first few books when all of the loose ends came together in a couple of climactic chapters despite seeming a Gordian mess just pages before. But now the girl is getting into all kinds of ridiculous abilities that are simultaneously overpowered and nonsensical, and simultaneously the plots are starting to feel like Ms. Hamilton has a page limit that she’s accidentally bumping up against (perhaps due to all the new and delightful sex?), which causes her to wave her wand of plot resolution and end the book on a dime. Not a good dime, either, one of those buffalo wooden dimes that are fake and worthless in every way, and by the end of the stock show you just find them laying on the street because nobody cares enough to hold onto them. Hell, not even that good. We’re talking buffalo nickels, here, people.

Oh, in case you care, the plot was about the visit of the vampiric master council, who are apparently in charge of all things vampire? Only, I guess not really, since they’ve never been mentioned before and seem to have little or no influence in America, just the Old World. That, and a pyrokinetic is maybe setting some fires around town, so Anita should help with that, since… well, for some reason. Maybe necromancers can squirt a lot of…. while I was typing that, the thought took an unfortunate turn in my head, so I’m going to stop now. Later, in what I hope will be a large number of months from now, fear for me when I get around to reading the next one, if it’s anything like this. ‘Cause, wow.