Kiss the Dead
Anita Blake Series
Laurell K. Hamilton

When a fifteen year old girl is abducted by vampires, it's up to U.S. Marshal Anita Blake to find her. And when she does, she's faced with something she's never seen before: a terrifyingly ordinary group of people - kids, grandparents, soccer moms - all recently turned and willing to die to avoid serving a master. And where there's one martyr, there will be more.
But even vampires have monsters that they're afraid of. And Anita is one of them.

This book could have been so much better than it was if it didn't "bookend" the plot. The beginning and the end of the novel dealt with the rogue vampires who wanted to kill Anita and refused to swear allegiance to any master vampire. Many of them, the ordinary looking ones, went so far as to be killed while the news was filming to gather sympathy for their cause.

The middle of the story went back to Anita and sex with her many men. It had absolutely nothing to do with the plot and was pretty much just supernatural sexcapades. Nothing erotic, just more of the same bizzaro vampire/lycanthrope/orgy sex that these books are filled with now.

The end was tying up the plot in a very unsatisfactory way. Had the book just run with the plot, it could have been another good one. But instead, the plot yet again took a back seat to the author's need to have her character have sex with many men (and now even a woman).

This is one of those series that when you get so far, you feel you might as well read them all. It's what I did. But even though some of the novels are top notch, I really don't think the author will ever go back to her original writing style. I happen to prefer plot to bizzaro sex.

If you've read the whole series, you might as well not stop now because at the time of this review, this is the last book in the series (the next one is not due out until 2013).

My review: Three out of five snails.