Anita Blake: Bullet
Jul. 18th, 2011 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackThis was much, much better than "Flirt", which suffered from, you know, not having any plot and not much of anything else, though what it had was ok. It suffers from building on the continuity of the last several books which to me seems rather over-encumbered with the sex life of Anita's sextumverate of power, but it definitely builds an overarching plot with the Vampire Council, which is actually interesting.
(And the personal interactions of the main characters are fairly good, even though they suffer from the notable flaws that (i) the extensive descriptions of domination/submission sex are not that interesting (how the hell do you make that boring?) and (ii) although the characters' emotional arcs are interesting, they're too abrupt "Oh, although I never mentioned it before, actually I feel all whiny and pouty about X, lets solve it with sex")
However, although the first two-thirds is going fairly well, the last third sort of loses the plot. There's a desperate fight to cull a previously-mainstream American master of a city who is posessed by one of the Council and leads all his immediate followers on a killing spree, and eventually cut down only by the police with extermination squads with flamethrowers, and a similar incident in Europe ended only by the army. Most American masters of the city, after seeming willing to fight against it, are sufficiently scared to propose alliance with Jean-Claud, beginning to form an American alliance. The council and the Harlequin are both divided, in outright civil war. But all that is narrated in a few short phone calls on the last couple of pages, while the main plot introduces EVEN MORE thin rationales why everyone has to have sex with EVEN MORE good looking annoying people they don't know!
(And the personal interactions of the main characters are fairly good, even though they suffer from the notable flaws that (i) the extensive descriptions of domination/submission sex are not that interesting (how the hell do you make that boring?) and (ii) although the characters' emotional arcs are interesting, they're too abrupt "Oh, although I never mentioned it before, actually I feel all whiny and pouty about X, lets solve it with sex")
However, although the first two-thirds is going fairly well, the last third sort of loses the plot. There's a desperate fight to cull a previously-mainstream American master of a city who is posessed by one of the Council and leads all his immediate followers on a killing spree, and eventually cut down only by the police with extermination squads with flamethrowers, and a similar incident in Europe ended only by the army. Most American masters of the city, after seeming willing to fight against it, are sufficiently scared to propose alliance with Jean-Claud, beginning to form an American alliance. The council and the Harlequin are both divided, in outright civil war. But all that is narrated in a few short phone calls on the last couple of pages, while the main plot introduces EVEN MORE thin rationales why everyone has to have sex with EVEN MORE good looking annoying people they don't know!
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Date: 2011-07-18 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-18 05:12 pm (UTC)