Bloody Bones (Anita Blake Vampire Hunter)

In some of Laurell Hamilton's excellent supernatural thrillers about Anita Blake, the Vampire Executioner, we forget that Anita raises the dead for a living, and that her involvements with the undead, the temporarily furry and the St Louis Police Department are only a sideline. In Bloody Bones, she is hired to raise the victims of some long-ago mass slaughter, a pile of dismembered arms and legs and skulls and ribs, and identify them. Her employers want to build a luxury hotel on ground claimed by the Bouvier clan as an old burial ground--and the Bouviers are not entirely human... Add to the mix murders too brutal to be obviously vampiric, a feud between Anita's vampire date Jean-Claude and the older vampire who rules the neighbouring countryside--and we have the sort of complicated mess of intrigue which Hamilton always handles so well. Anita is an interesting character because so torn between what she is, a necromancer with the power to compel the dead, and a person far too accomplished at violence, and her religious beliefs, as well as between her attraction to Jean-Claude and her love for the werewolf Richard. She is a fascinating series character because she changes so much.--Roz Kaveney