This book is the second in the Anita Blake series. Anita is recruited to help the police solve a particularly gruesome series of murders, while simultaneously fending off a client who won’t take no for an answer and the advances of vampire Jean-Claude.

This book isn’t as good as the first. Hamilton has set up a great world with some interesting characters. She’s even got some great scenes that bring the supernatural to life in a relatively realistic fashion.

But somehow it just doesn’t quite hang all together. I fell for the red herring, simply because I thought the true answer was too obvious. And already there’s some inconsistancy between books, with competing stories over what happens when an animator is raised from the dead. We are also told in the first book a brief sketch of what happened to the person that gave Jean-Claude his scar and yet the second book finds Anita seems to have completely forgotten this.

I want to like this book. And I did quite enjoy the parts with Jean-Claude in them. But it really needed some more work.