I really loved Laurell K. Hamilton's early Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series books but I did feel like she lost the thread a bit in the middle of the series. I am glad to say that it seems like she is focusing more on the story line and less on the sex of late which makes the books better in my opinion. I think Anita is a great character and Laurell K. Hamilton can write a great plot but her overly complicated sex scenes can somewhat take away from the book. ( )

I would've given this story two stars, because it isn't the worst thing I've read, but the last part annoyed me so much. If you're in someone else's wedding you don't steal the attention form the couple, that's very rude. ( )

I liked this as an outtake but really would like a book with half a dozen or more outtakes/short stories covering all the missing information from the series. In Dead Ice we finally see in print that Narcissus lost the baby. I wonder what happened to the vampires in Colin's city in Tennessee after he died, what does happen to an entire city of vampires if their master dies...did all of them that were blood oathed die with him and why hasn't Anita angst about murdering an entire town of 'people'. I wonder if Sampson came back and whether or not he became a siren or if his brothers got their turn at Anita. I would like to know if the naga survived and how. Does London find a new home and how does he go back on the ardeur wagon? Is Requiem okay and happy? A day in the life of the Wicked Truth. Oh so many loose ends to be tied up. One of the things that negative reviewers complain about is Anita not changing or growing. This does not take into account that only six years have passed since she met JC and only three since she started collecting all the lycanthropes and upping the sexual antics and its inherent wangst. No one changes a lifetime of childhood's rules and Catholicism that fast. The outer trappings of one's life may change 180 degrees overnight but the person's internalizing and adjusting does not. Readers have been reading for 20 years and they have all grown older and changed perspectives and attitudes during that period and Anita is not keeping up with them. You have to treat the books like a Peanuts cartoon. He never gets older, he never changes, twenty years down the road and he is still mooning over the little red headed girl and Snoopy is still alive...we all know dogs don't live that long. Of course, i thought all the public kissing was overdone but I loved the talk with Tomas. ( )

Anita and her main squeezes at Manny's daughter's wedding. Make sure to have read Dead Ice before this book. Very interesting, reading more about some of the secondary characters.
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Meh. I enjoyed this story well enough, but it was too short and a bit too bland to really do anything for me. It also felt cut short, with an antagonistic encounter between Anita and the mother of the groom that never got a follow-up. It wasn't so much that I wanted to read it, since it was the same "inexplicably stubbord and aggressive person picks a pointless fight with Anita" scene that occurs at least once in every novel, but I expected to see some kind of resolution to the conflict, and it just didn't happen.

Good enough for a short story, but I wouldn't go out of my way to read it. ( )