Skin Trade (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #17) By: Laurell K. Hamilton (Book Review)

 ***This review will contain spoilers***

Summary:

Once you tell someone certain things, like, say, you got mailed a human head in a box, they tend to think you're crazy.

Anita Blake's reputation has taken some hits. Not on the work front, where she has the highest kill count of all the legal vampire executioners in the country, but on the personal front. No one seems to trust a woman who sleeps with the monsters. Still, when a vampire serial killer sends her a head from Las Vegas, Anita has to warn Sin City's local authorities what they're dealing with. Only it's worse than she thought. Several officers and one executioner have been slain - paranormal style...

Anita heads to Las Vegas, where she's joined by three other federal marshals, including the ruthless Edward hiding behind his mild-mannered persona. It's a good thing Edward always has her back, because, when she gets close to the bodies, Anita senses "tiger" too strongly to ignore it. The were-tigers are very powerful in Las Vegas, which means the odds of her rubbing someone important the wrong way just got a lot higher...

This book reminds me of old school Anita Blake. We've got dead bodies killed by a supernatural creature, Anita has got her detective hat on and a shit ton of weapons. This book revived my faith in this series because if there were more weird bs sex scenes I was going to call it quits. It's so strange how the story shifted from Anita being a strong independent woman who kicks ass for a living to now being a slave to her sexual magic ardeur. Talk about changing the whole script on us. A lot of books in this series has had no substance but this one was pretty good. We had a few hiccups but overall it reminds me of what we were first introduced to from the start of the series. 

Anita heads to Vegas to help hunt down Vittorio, a vampire who has wrecked havoc in St. Louis before in the past but he disappeared before she could kill him. There's a level of mystery that we haven't seen in quite a while from this series. There's a mystery around who or what killed law enforcement including a powerful psychic and practicing wiccan, and there's a mystery around why Anita is so enamored by the local tigers. Granted, I'm not overly thrilled when Anita suddenly 'blacks out' and has sex with a bunch of random partners because Marmee Noir unleashed the ardeur but I'm happy that I get to skip the awkwardness of having to read such weird sexual encounters. 

I'm ok with the weird attraction she has to the tigers. But what I'm not ok with is Hamilton writing about Anita having sex with a minor. I was grossed out with the shapeshifter sex but I'm drawing the line on minors. How do you get passed that? Even when she blacks out and they all have sex. Technically, that is rape as well. I don't know how to digest that shit. I just try to brush past it and get back to the actual plot. The history on weretigers and the different coloured clans is fascinating, especially, how the yellow tiger was the supreme tiger ruler over the other colours/ clans. Anita is collecting tigers left and right. I wish at this point she would shapeshift into a tiger and get this whole bullshit of holding on to her humanity to make her as human as possible. I'm over that narrative. Another thing I'm over is how all of a sudden all guys are attracted to her. It wasn't like this at the beginning of the series. I wonder if Hamilton is trying to demonstrate the transformation of Anita as she becomes more like Belle Morte with the ardeur. If we get another scene where a guy says she's pretty and she says "I don't see it" I'm going to lose my freaking mind. I hate when we keep getting the same scene over and over again. 

I have to say I absolutely loved the scene with Archangel Michael. I pray to him every chance I get and I'm happy that he was included and was shown to be strong enough to stand against Marmee Noir and protect Anita from her evilness. I wish Hamilton would have focused more on when Michael said along the lines of Anita not being evil. This has been a point of contention for so long for Anita. Always afraid that everything she can do means she is evil. If Archangel Michael says you're not evil, then you're not evil. I enjoyed the added scenes with Marmee Noir but what was super lackluster was the reveal that Vittorio is Father Day...No one ever mentioned this before. This is something that would have been brought up previously when Marmee Noir first came into the picture. Talk about throwing some shit together to try to tie things in. 

The ending of this book was a little troubling for me because Hamilton used to be able to end it with a bang (sex pun not intended) but this book's ending was quite lackluster. The build up to it was amazing! There were a lot of supporting characters that really added to the story and built up the plot. The SWAT team full of psychics with different abilities opened up a field of possibilities and I hope that Anita ends up working with them again or even if St. Louis created a team like that. It's nice that Anita works as a team with others to accomplish a main goal. It adds another level of complexity that I find has been lacking. Anita was able to defeat Vittorio by using the ardeur against him. I'm sorry but a violent as fuck vampire who controls Jinns to cut people into pieces is suddenly defeated by the ardeur? She never had such control before with it and now she can weaponize it? I would have loved to either have her kill him with a weapon or he forces her to shapeshift and she kills him while in tiger mode.

Rating:

I'm giving Skin Trade 4.5 stars on 5. Overall, this was a great book with amazing plot and very reminiscent of old school Anita Blake but the ending was so anticlimactic. I expected more from Hamilton. Granted, we still had about half a dozen different sex scenes but I appreciate her keeping them short. I hope the next book continues to have a plot because if we go back to just sex I'm gonna lose it.