Kiss the Dead
lois says:
It took me quite a while to finish this one because I kept putting it down for days at a time before picking it back up which is not a good sign. Everything I have to come to hate about this series over the past several books were on full display here. I am so damn sick of the following: 1) Every other female character other than Anita herself is always a jealous, petty person. WHY? In this book, the females she works with on the police force are jealous bitches and it is infuriating--...I can't imagine professional women behaving this way in their place of work or giving a damn about how many men Anita Blake might be sleeping with. 2) Speaking of the all people Anita has in her bed...I'm not being a prude about it, but I hate that she is constantly surrounded by all these characters that I literally cannot even remember from past books even though they've obviously been mentioned. She's surrounded by so many shifters that I can't keep them all straight. It makes me miss the days when it was just her and Jean Claude. 3) I CANNOT STAND the fact that we are still being slammed in the face with the idea that Anita is a bigger monster than the monsters. This is in the most irritating running thread throughout these books. I realize that Anita is feared among many members of the vampire/wereanimal communities because of her kill record, but seriously, dude, give this crap a rest. She is not a bigger monster. Stop slapping me in the face with this. 4) The dynamic she has with many members of the police force is kinda sickening--we constantly have to hear about how surprised these guys are by her abilities to handle so much BECAUSE SHE IS A WOMAN. There are other female officers, etc. You cannot be telling me that in 2016 these men still think that women can't do a damn thing in the criminal justice field when women have proven themselves (NOT THAT THEY EVEN HAVE TO) to be just as competent as men. This grosses me out. And Anita constantly assigns certain qualities solely to men and some solely to women and it's just such a SHOCKER when one or the other "crosses over" and shows some masculine/feminine quality. *rolling my eyes as hard as I frigging can* These things make these books so weak because it's just so old at this point and I'm sick of hearing about it. It's the same crap again and again and each book is weaker than the last because of it (or largely because of it). There are three more recent books after this one and I don't have a strong desire to read them because I don't care about these characters anymore. Not even Anita. ESPECIALLY not Anita...
ladygutta says:
Chapter one started out ok. Anita is once again working, shocking! (I know right?) She's interrogating a perp who is believed to be hiding a 15 y/o missing girl. Blake is acting like her usual badass self. I let myself think, for once, that we might get a cop drama like the good old days. The good new is, this is a vampire hunter story. The bad news is, she crams that in the very beginning, a bit in the middle and an a scene at the end. What does she do for the other 300 pages? Let's see.*First she screws it up with graphic metaphors like this:"...was like a piece of cupcake with dark bittersweet chocolate icing that could be licked away, to the warm, moist cake, and then the hot, liquid center where the sweetest, thickest chocolate lay waiting like some hidden treasure that would make the anger even tastier. All I had to do was bite through that sweet, slightly salty skin of his wrist that was just above my mouth..."*Then we have more repetitive guy speak (insert cave man grunts here):"He understood that I'd understood that he'd understood. It took us one sentence, two looks, and a nod -with another woman it would have been at least five minutes of out-loud talking. Lucky for me I spoke fluent guy.""It was against the guy code to question it that bluntly. I could...be the girl - but with new officers I had to be one of the guys. Guys didn't ask about emotions unless they had to."*We get classic one liners like;"Nicky was like a muscle sandwich of manly goodness."*We get more unorganized thoughts that make no sense. On page 48 she asks herself, "Did Jean Claude steal power from then just to grow his hair long for me, when they could have used it to heal their wounds, grow their own hair? Was it true?"Then on page 94 she says she asked Jean Claude months ago if he took power from other vampires to grow his hair and the hair of those he wanted to give it to. So which is it? And does it really matter? Are these vamps staging a coup because they want 80's rock band hair?*We have loads more sex a fight, gun talk, some overly descriptive oral gymnastics, a shower, more gun talk, some knife talk, then more sex, more fighting, a death scare (for once it's not Damien), more oral, more telling us how tight that over-used magical thing is, and then more sex.Just as the book got really interesting I checked and it's at 96%. She spent over 1/3 of the book talking about sex with all the sweeties and what color the pillows are but we get the drop dead bad news and there is only 4% of the book to wrap it up?!It could have been a pretty good storyline but it was like a slap in the face. One minute you're reading normal stuff the next you're getting action overload and the following minute it's over. That's pretty much how all of these last few books have ended. So I decided to cap this review by using my Kindle powers for research rather than reading. Since the reviews all seem to be the same, and if you took out all the flaccid penis tonsil hockey, you could probably put about 3 books in 1. I've decided to look up how many times she uses the word "spill" per book. In the first four books she averaged 3.5 times per book. In books #5 thru #20 (I'm not including the 2 short stories) she uses the word "spill" an average of 22.9 times. That's just the average of all 16 books, some had more some had less. The record, for inquiring minds, was Bullet with a total of 54 spills, followed by Bloody Bones 35, and Incubus Dreams 34. That's a lot of spillage boys and girls! And it can be pretty much anything that spills, hair, light, clothes, the beans, my personal, cringe-worthy favorite, male anatomy, nearly anything but liquids.That aside the thing that really bothered me the most in this book was the scene in the middle. They have some time to kill before dawn so Anita and Zebrowski decide to go out to eat. They are joined by a new Marshal in training who's trying to get away from the overly aggressive Det. Arnet. Apparently she's got her sights set on the new guy and won't take no for an answer. He sneaks off with the dynamic duo and tells them he's gay but doesn't want to be "outed" but can't think of a way to get Arnet to leave him alone.REALLY?!?! Let me get this straight...a hot detective is thought to be hitting on Anita at a crime scene in Obsidian Butterfly. So everyone goes nuts and makes a big deal about it and she hates it. But in St. Louis every female in breeding range has the hots for the new guy especially Arnet who has turned into the office slut. But we're in the middle of a murder investigation and it's turned into the dating game and no one bats an eyelid? This book just drives home the fact that Hamilton uses Arnet to take the heat off the real slut, Blake.Why? Why does this matter? Who cares? When is it ever OK for a cop to say to another cop, just hours after 2 fellow officers were brutally murdered, "Was wondering if you would do me the honor of being my first date here in St. Louis, Detective Arnet." All it seems to do is make Arnet look like bad and Anita look like a saint. That's a bit bassackwards if you ask me! I'm sorry but a murder investigation of police officers would never end with an episode of the Bachelor With Badges. It just wouldn't happen.MoreLess
It took me quite a while to finish this one because I kept putting it down for days at a time before picking it back up which is not a good sign. Everything I have to come to hate about this series over the past several books were on full display here. I am so damn sick of the following: 1) Every other female character other than Anita herself is always a jealous, petty person. WHY? In this book, the females she works with on the police force are jealous bitches and it is infuriating--...I can't imagine professional women behaving this way in their place of work or giving a damn about how many men Anita Blake might be sleeping with. 2) Speaking of the all people Anita has in her bed...I'm not being a prude about it, but I hate that she is constantly surrounded by all these characters that I literally cannot even remember from past books even though they've obviously been mentioned. She's surrounded by so many shifters that I can't keep them all straight. It makes me miss the days when it was just her and Jean Claude. 3) I CANNOT STAND the fact that we are still being slammed in the face with the idea that Anita is a bigger monster than the monsters. This is in the most irritating running thread throughout these books. I realize that Anita is feared among many members of the vampire/wereanimal communities because of her kill record, but seriously, dude, give this crap a rest. She is not a bigger monster. Stop slapping me in the face with this. 4) The dynamic she has with many members of the police force is kinda sickening--we constantly have to hear about how surprised these guys are by her abilities to handle so much BECAUSE SHE IS A WOMAN. There are other female officers, etc. You cannot be telling me that in 2016 these men still think that women can't do a damn thing in the criminal justice field when women have proven themselves (NOT THAT THEY EVEN HAVE TO) to be just as competent as men. This grosses me out. And Anita constantly assigns certain qualities solely to men and some solely to women and it's just such a SHOCKER when one or the other "crosses over" and shows some masculine/feminine quality. *rolling my eyes as hard as I frigging can* These things make these books so weak because it's just so old at this point and I'm sick of hearing about it. It's the same crap again and again and each book is weaker than the last because of it (or largely because of it). There are three more recent books after this one and I don't have a strong desire to read them because I don't care about these characters anymore. Not even Anita. ESPECIALLY not Anita...
ladygutta says:
Chapter one started out ok. Anita is once again working, shocking! (I know right?) She's interrogating a perp who is believed to be hiding a 15 y/o missing girl. Blake is acting like her usual badass self. I let myself think, for once, that we might get a cop drama like the good old days. The good new is, this is a vampire hunter story. The bad news is, she crams that in the very beginning, a bit in the middle and an a scene at the end. What does she do for the other 300 pages? Let's see.*First she screws it up with graphic metaphors like this:"...was like a piece of cupcake with dark bittersweet chocolate icing that could be licked away, to the warm, moist cake, and then the hot, liquid center where the sweetest, thickest chocolate lay waiting like some hidden treasure that would make the anger even tastier. All I had to do was bite through that sweet, slightly salty skin of his wrist that was just above my mouth..."*Then we have more repetitive guy speak (insert cave man grunts here):"He understood that I'd understood that he'd understood. It took us one sentence, two looks, and a nod -with another woman it would have been at least five minutes of out-loud talking. Lucky for me I spoke fluent guy.""It was against the guy code to question it that bluntly. I could...be the girl - but with new officers I had to be one of the guys. Guys didn't ask about emotions unless they had to."*We get classic one liners like;"Nicky was like a muscle sandwich of manly goodness."*We get more unorganized thoughts that make no sense. On page 48 she asks herself, "Did Jean Claude steal power from then just to grow his hair long for me, when they could have used it to heal their wounds, grow their own hair? Was it true?"Then on page 94 she says she asked Jean Claude months ago if he took power from other vampires to grow his hair and the hair of those he wanted to give it to. So which is it? And does it really matter? Are these vamps staging a coup because they want 80's rock band hair?*We have loads more sex a fight, gun talk, some overly descriptive oral gymnastics, a shower, more gun talk, some knife talk, then more sex, more fighting, a death scare (for once it's not Damien), more oral, more telling us how tight that over-used magical thing is, and then more sex.Just as the book got really interesting I checked and it's at 96%. She spent over 1/3 of the book talking about sex with all the sweeties and what color the pillows are but we get the drop dead bad news and there is only 4% of the book to wrap it up?!It could have been a pretty good storyline but it was like a slap in the face. One minute you're reading normal stuff the next you're getting action overload and the following minute it's over. That's pretty much how all of these last few books have ended. So I decided to cap this review by using my Kindle powers for research rather than reading. Since the reviews all seem to be the same, and if you took out all the flaccid penis tonsil hockey, you could probably put about 3 books in 1. I've decided to look up how many times she uses the word "spill" per book. In the first four books she averaged 3.5 times per book. In books #5 thru #20 (I'm not including the 2 short stories) she uses the word "spill" an average of 22.9 times. That's just the average of all 16 books, some had more some had less. The record, for inquiring minds, was Bullet with a total of 54 spills, followed by Bloody Bones 35, and Incubus Dreams 34. That's a lot of spillage boys and girls! And it can be pretty much anything that spills, hair, light, clothes, the beans, my personal, cringe-worthy favorite, male anatomy, nearly anything but liquids.That aside the thing that really bothered me the most in this book was the scene in the middle. They have some time to kill before dawn so Anita and Zebrowski decide to go out to eat. They are joined by a new Marshal in training who's trying to get away from the overly aggressive Det. Arnet. Apparently she's got her sights set on the new guy and won't take no for an answer. He sneaks off with the dynamic duo and tells them he's gay but doesn't want to be "outed" but can't think of a way to get Arnet to leave him alone.REALLY?!?! Let me get this straight...a hot detective is thought to be hitting on Anita at a crime scene in Obsidian Butterfly. So everyone goes nuts and makes a big deal about it and she hates it. But in St. Louis every female in breeding range has the hots for the new guy especially Arnet who has turned into the office slut. But we're in the middle of a murder investigation and it's turned into the dating game and no one bats an eyelid? This book just drives home the fact that Hamilton uses Arnet to take the heat off the real slut, Blake.Why? Why does this matter? Who cares? When is it ever OK for a cop to say to another cop, just hours after 2 fellow officers were brutally murdered, "Was wondering if you would do me the honor of being my first date here in St. Louis, Detective Arnet." All it seems to do is make Arnet look like bad and Anita look like a saint. That's a bit bassackwards if you ask me! I'm sorry but a murder investigation of police officers would never end with an episode of the Bachelor With Badges. It just wouldn't happen.MoreLess
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