Before fifty pages of Burnt Offerings have gone by, Anita's learned of a pyrokinetic arsonist at large, quelled a hospital room full of frenzied were-leopards and werewolves, been acknowledged as their dominant female, gone home to put on a slinky formal and gone out again for her date with Jean-Claude, the Master of St. Louis. The formal's a bit of a challenge (how do you hide those guns in a slinky strapless number?) but then so is the date -- mere pages further on, their cozy dinner for two is interrupted by the minions of the secret, and incredibly powerful, council of vampires. Seems Anita and Jean-Claude polished off one of their members, the million-year-old Homo erectus Mr. Oliver, in a previous installment, and Jean Claude is now entitled, indeed, expected, to take his seat, whether he wants to or not. Then the book really starts to move...

Let's get one thing straight: this isn't Tolstoy. It's more like Dick Tracy with fangs -- but nevertheless, Hamilton's crunchy prose moves along so briskly, you'll have wolfed it down like a tube of Pringles and be looking for more before you know what hit you. This is real B-movie stuff, no apologies, right down to the crisp Chandler-esque sentences and tough-talking dialogue.

Nevertheless, it rises above your average pulpdom with lots of vivid description, plenty of fast and dry sardonic humour, and some really good character definition; even the monsters and various monster-bait bit parts manage to take on a life of their own... so to speak. And Anita Blake makes a punchy protagonist -- easy to mistake for a Cute Li'l Thing, she has to stay on top of the male chauvinists as well as the monsters, and does so with verve and panache.

I'm a bit worried though; I don't know how much longer Hamilton can pull this off. With her magic and her collection of firearms, Anita's more than a match for just about anyone -- or anything -- that goes up against her. She cleans out a couple more council members' clocks for them (oh, come on, you're not really surprised, are you?), and with her new three-way bond of power between Jean-Claude and her lycanthrope ex-boyfriend Richard, she's just about unstoppable. I'm also getting a little tired of the multiple-rape subplots, a feature that's become more and more prevalent. I fear the worst -- a bad case of incipient super-duper-heroism.

All that aside, I've been reading these since the first one came out, and I have to say, they're gruesome, but heaps of fun. They're a delightfully refreshing change of pace from the fashionably-gloomy Gothware currently flooding the vampire market, and  for a quick read on a rainy Sunday, they can't be beat. I'll be watching for the next one, if only to see what kind of nemesis Anita could possibly go up against next.