I used to be a HUGE fan of the Anita Blake series by Laurell K. Hamilton. And by “huge,” I mean, I read the first book and then bought every other book after it. (At the time, there were several books out in paperback, so I really lucked out.)

Flirt + crazy morning hair = Freaking Bookworm!

I became enthralled with Anita; she was a strong lead in a world full of vampires, werewolves, and all kinds of other mythical creatures. She was a necromancer, a vampire hunter, and the object of affection of the Master of the City — the gorgeous Jean Claude.

I most loved watching her work as a necromancer. She’s a consultant at a reanimation firm in St. Louis. It was cool to see the different clients, their reasons for raising their dead, and the things that could go wrong as a result of missing a step or having too much power.

It was also cool watching her relationship with Jean Claude unfold. That is, until the ardeur storyline started.

Basically, Anita is now some sort of living vampire, and is Jean Claude’s human servant. Subsequently, she also began to gain some of his line’s powers. One of those is the ability to feed off of sex. At first, this was cool. My favorite series started to borderline erotica, which is fine with me. But as the series got longer and longer, it seemed that each book was less story and more, well, sex. It got to the point where each sex scene was the most annoying thing ever — and that’s a leap, for me.

I stopped reading Anita Blake, because it just felt pointless. There was a sex scene every five pages, it seemed, and Anita? Became the biggest ho of fantasy fiction EVER. She had over five lovers, five boyfriends.

So when my Nana — who is a huge Anita Blake fan, and the reason I started reading them — lent me Flirt, I was a little skeptical. I hadn’t read any Anita books since The Harlequin, so I’d missed two. Nana said this one was much better than they’ve been lately, so I shrugged and left it sitting in a pile of other stuff for a few days.

I got bored with On the Road, though, and didn’t want to start reading the Batman graphic novels Mike lent me just yet, so I decided to crack open Flirt. Call it morbid curiosity, or an old habit, but I kind of wanted to see if it really was better.

It started off with Anita in her office at Animators, Inc., discussing a possible zombie raising with a client. Immediately, I was excited; I couldn’t remember the last time an Anita Blake book had spent any time on her necromancy. Unfortunately, though, the book had a slow start, and when Anita’s boyfriends were described — “pretty,” “long hair,” “pretty,” — I almost shut the book for good. But I plowed on, determined to see if this time would be different.

Although Flirt isn’t Laurell K. Hamilton’s best, it’s the best she’s written in the series in a while. There was only one sex scene, and it didn’t go on and on like they usually do in this series. The book focused almost entirely on Anita’s necromancy, and explored some more of her powers (which I am not going to tell you about, because if you haven’t read much of the series, this will completely spoil you).