Book #75

Micah
by Laurell K. Hamilton

A nice, short, well-written book after the last hunk of indigestible nonsense. I finished this one in an afternoon, a very pleasant afternoon spent curled up in a recliner, reading about sex and love and the undead, with murders being solved and new ones occurring, an averted procreation emergency, and secrets revealed all over the place. It was fun.

This was the shortest and easiest of the Anita Blake books I've read so far; it most likely should have been called a novella, since the 280 pages was a stretch: the font was larger, the printing had more white space as well as headers and footers, and there was a title page for each chapter, blank but for the chapter number. Reminded me a little of a student essay that doesn't quite hit the requirements. But going into it with the expectation of a shorter story, it was very nice, a little friendly visit back to Anita's world before moving on to something else.

The story was fine, with Anita going to her most annoying zombie-raising to date. It's for an important mob informant who had a sudden heart attack before he could testify, and so there is a judge and two sets of lawyers present at the raising. The raising starts off bad, because this is the first time Anita has walked into a graveyard as old as the one where the informant was buried since her triumvirate reached a new power plateau, and so the dead begin whispering to her, trying to goad her into raising all of them -- or perhaps not; the whispers are not coherent. The pressure she feels, however, is, and there's a great suspense scene where Anita is trying to move the whole raising along so she can get it over with and leave, and the lawyer trying to delay the proceedings -- we assume for the sake of slowing down the conviction, but it turns out to be a much nastier reason -- while the judge slows everything down even more simply because he is a bombastic pedant, and demands Anita explain every step of the procedure in proper legalese, with proper respect to the court, of course.

The unusual aspect of this plot was that it actually wrapped up quickly once the action started -- and what's more, Hamilton skipped the bloody scene. For maybe the first time in these books, Anita was simply knocked unconscious at the beginning of the fight, and when she wakes up it's all over. I was a touch disappointed, as this has been one of the draws for me -- the fact that Hamilton goes into glorious, gory detail with all of the bloody bits as well as all the sex scenes -- and there was a detailed sex scene earlier, but at the same time, it felt like a nice bit of balance: there is no way that Anita can make it through every single fight she gets into without being sidelined at least once. Accidents happen, and sometimes, no matter how good you are, the other guy gets in a lucky shot. It was nice to see that happen.

So part of me wishes it had been longer, and part of me was glad I was able to move through it so quickly. In the end, I just liked it.