Kiss the Dead: An Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Novel

Laurell K Hamilton does something that many authors offer, but none actually deliver: She has created an alternate reality with excellent character development, and uses the character development to illustrate how traumatized people can heal. "Hurt people hurt people" is a very simplistic explanation for how Asher chooses to navigate the world. Anita demonstrates the falsehood in that trite statement, because Anita has chosen **not** to hurt people. Women may love the Anita Blake series for the paranormal erotica, men are beginning to appreciate the series for Laurell's nuanced approach to explaining how social conditioning is harming men. Learning to understand Nicky's thoughts and his (reasoning behind his) relationships with others helps men IRL learn the value of emotions. Despite critics claims that some scenes are gratuitous, the metaphysics simply don't work without each detail in the carefully crafted scenes. Laurell has crafted deeply emotional, complex characters.

The last few books in the series has had these long drawn out heartstopping suspense scenes... this book only had a few short ones enough to give the read enough to feed the addiction.... this book wasn't meant to be that sort of story.... I think that its purpose was to dig deeper into Anita's relationships with people around her to the complexities of her character and show how much she is grown... as a side note it also shows how the humans around her have become accepting or unaccepting of her life

I will not spoil the book for those of you who haven't read it yet. I have seen a lot of complaints about it but honestly, either you're into the series or you would have stopped reading long ago. At least this book was worth the money. Only complaint is it's a series, we don't need a beginners description about everything this far into a series. We got it already.