Kiss the Dead by Laurell K. Hamilton

This is the nineteenth book in the Anita Blake series, and it gets started off in a hurry - no foreplay. Anita is interrogating a new vampire in the police station, trying to discover the location of a fifteen year old girl that his band of "free" vamps have kidnapped and are about to turn. Things get out of hand, and end up in a brawl between the vamp, Anita, and the cops, including her old pals Zerbrowski and Dolph.

It seems, though, like Hamilton is getting away from the wild and crazy monster hunting action that got me hooked on this series in the beginning, and descending into too much PNR action. She spends far too many pages describing how each and every one of her lovers looks and acts, and what Anita loves about each of them in particular. There's even more of Anita's thoughts and emotions about ...eek...relationships. I'm fairly certain that we've seen a lot of the descriptive information before, and it seems vaguely like "cheating" to get the required number of pages to fill a novel, rather than writing a strong plot with great action sequences. Of course, whenever Anita isn't busy being all girly, there's too many pages of explanation about why she's, just "one of the guys" with all her cop buddies now, and how macho men from SWAT and the U.S. Marshalls service, and the RPIT all bond as manly men.

The descriptive, romance stuff just goes on and on for pages, I'm afraid, with a minimal number of pages devoted to taking on the bad guys, who are a group of vampires who want to remain free of the control wielded by master vampires - a nice idea in theory, but impractical and dangerous in reality. There are, I think, more pages devoted to the usual graphic sex scenes - I think Anita screws more monsters than she kills in this one.

Stick a fork in me, I'm done...paying for crappy novels by Hamilton.