Skin Trade

I love books with a strong heroine, and I personally own every single Laurell K. Hamilton book I can in hardcover. I'm sorry to say this 17th book was a disappointment. Anita felt weak in this book. She even sounded weak. She spent a good deal of time whining and internalizing. In scenes where she could have come across as the powerful necromancer / Executioner, her strengths were waffled away through a continual narrative focus on whether she'd fed the ardeur yet. And who was going to feed her. And who thought who else was sleeping with her.

Marmee Noir is killed off in the last few pages or so of the book. After building her up to the Mother of all Vampires over the course of several books, this seemed abrupt and anticlimactic. Vittorio - who seems to be an interesting and powerful replacement for her in the story line - is killed off shortly thereafter. The jinns were interesting but never went anywhere. The title - “Skin Trade” - to be honest, not even sure how that ties into what happened in the book.

An actual Anita Blake story like the ones from the beginning. Fighting supernatural bad guys, and I enjoyed the paranormal crime solving. The love interests were pared down (less than 20 in number), and not most if the book (why I stopped reading her stuff entirely). Even though the story was great, the new love interests are upsetting. The worst one is the 7 on 1 orgy with a non-consenting 16 year old. Apparently if they were all blacked out it makes it okay. And the boy will be shipped off to New Orleans when 17 to continue such an awful storyline.
Not for me. So dropping series again.

I received this book as a Goodreads prize.

Since Anita gained the ardeur, this series has been in my eyes mainly about sex and less about the story. I stopped reading the Anita Blake series because of that, ending with Blood Noir. My brother convinced me to give Anita another try so I picked up Skin Trade and was pleasantly surprised. Laurell Hamilton has finally gone back to having a strong base storyline and plot. The first few lines of this book instantly made me hooked, having Anita receive a head in a box was proof enough for me that this novel would be grisly and dark like the original Anita's had been. While there was sex in the novel as it should be due to her ardeur, it was just enough to support the story and not take it over the top. I am really looking forward to the rest of this series now.

That's ★★★ when compared to the drivel that precedes this instalment in the series and ★ overall. I keep hoping the series will get better, because I like(d? past tense, possibly) Anita Blake, but that's probably not going to happen. My interest in Blake, her story, and the decisions and choices she makes, keeps me reading in spite of the rubbish writing. sigh

I kept saying I was giving up on Hamilton's books, then giving her just one more chance as each novel came out, hoping that at some point she'd give up the porn and write real novels again. With this volume, the effort is finally vindicated.

Don't get me wrong–there's definitely sex in Skin Trade. Sex with yet more new men, even! But it doesn't start happening ‘til well into the book, and when it does occur there's a lot more justification for it than at some times in the past. It's still explicit, and there are still likely to be more than two people in any given bed at a time, but if any of that squicked you, you wouldn't be reading any of her work.

The book nearly earned four stars, but there were a few plot holes that bothered me too much to forget them.