Bloody Bones Review: Back to the Bodies, but Not Back to the Beginning

Laurell K. Hamilton’s Bloody Bones, the fifth Anita Blake novel, feels almost like the series remembering what made its early procedural horror work. After The Lunatic Cafe allowed Anita’s romantic triangle to claim an increasingly large share of the narrative, the fifth book sends her out of St Louis for a professional animating job that develops into another brutal supernatural murder investigation.

I found the return welcome. Anita once again has bodies to examine, witnesses to distrust, police officers to antagonise and supernatural explanations that become more complicated as the evidence accumulates. The mystery is less straightforward than I remembered, and enough of its central machinery had disappeared from my memory that substantial stretches felt almost new.

Yet Bloody Bones does not actually take the series backwards. The relationship politics remain. Anita’s supernatural power continues to grow. The book contains more torture, bodily grotesquerie and sexualised menace than I had remembered existing this early. Even the increasingly extravagant climaxes that I associate with later Anita Blake are already becoming part of the formula.

That is the more interesting discovery of my broader return to Anita Blake. The series did not begin as one thing and then abruptly become another somewhere around Narcissus in Chains. Many of the ingredients were present much earlier. What changed was their proportion.

This review discusses the novel’s premise, recurring character dynamics and broad supernatural elements but avoids the solution to the murders and the details of the climax.

Cover image: Bloody Bones by Laurell K. Hamilton, published by Ace Books in 1996. Used here for purposes of review and commentary.

Back to the Procedural Engine

Anita initially travels to Branson, Missouri, for the kind of assignment that makes the supernatural world feel practical rather than decorative. A developer needs information connected to an old cemetery, and Anita’s ability to raise the dead provides a professional solution to an awkwardly mundane problem. Then a series of violent deaths begins drawing her into a much larger investigation.

This combination remains one of Hamilton’s strongest early-series structures. Anita does not go searching for mythology because the series needs another supernatural faction. She encounters it because someone has died and the ordinary explanation no longer fits the evidence. Her profession gives her a reason to cross boundaries between police work, necromancy and supernatural communities that would otherwise remain separate.

The mystery in Bloody Bones also has more layers than I remembered. The obvious explanation does not account for everything Anita encounters, and apparently separate problems begin interfering with one another. New information does more than identify another suspect; it changes Anita’s understanding of what kind of case she is investigating. As with my return to Dead Beat, memory had preserved several striking scenes and the broad destination while allowing central pieces of the route to disappear. I recognised the characters and some of the landmarks without remembering exactly how they connected, leaving the pleasant sensation of being somewhere between rereading and reading for the first time.

Bloody Bones is consequently more satisfying to me than The Lunatic Cafe. Relationship material still occupies part of the story, but it no longer repeatedly interrupts the professional plot to announce its importance. Anita is anchored by a difficult case, and the various supernatural pressures mostly converge on the same investigation.

The change from book four to book five also makes the series’ development look less orderly. The Lunatic Cafe seemed to push decisively towards romantic and sexual politics; Bloody Bones shifts much of the weight back towards corpses, crime and Anita’s professional competence. Hindsight likes clean turning points, especially once we know what a series eventually becomes. Reading the novels in sequence suggests something messier: different narrative engines are already competing, and their relative importance can rise and fall from one book to the next.

The Later Series Was Already There

The biggest correction to my memory concerns the darkness of the early books. I had mentally organised Anita Blake into a relatively clear before and after: the early period of violent supernatural investigations, followed later by the much more prominent combinations of sexuality, bodily transformation, fetishism and grotesque power dynamics that I associate particularly with Narcissus in Chains and what follows. Bloody Bones makes that chronology difficult to defend.

The balance is certainly different. Sexuality has not yet taken over the architecture of the series, and Anita’s professional work still determines the shape of the novel. But torture, body horror and sexualised menace are already embedded in Hamilton’s supernatural world. Bodies can be transformed, violated, controlled and displayed in ways that go well beyond the ordinary violence of a detective story.

The later transformation increasingly looks like a change of proportion rather than a change of kind. Once one element becomes dominant in a long series, memory tends to relocate its origins closer to the point where that dominance became impossible to ignore. Material that existed quietly for several books is retrospectively treated as though it arrived with the phase that made it central.

Hamilton was already interested in the connection between sex, power, bodily threat and supernatural hierarchy. The early novels place those interests inside stories still strongly governed by criminal investigation. The same applies to the romantic material. The Lunatic Cafe remains an important hinge because Anita, Richard and Jean-Claude begin demanding much more narrative attention. Bloody Bones does not erase that development; it shifts the investigation back into the foreground while carrying the newer relationship machinery along with it.

The ingredients were already in the kitchen; Hamilton was changing how much of each she used.

A Wider World Around Anita

Bloody Bones also brings the fey much more visibly into Anita’s world than I remembered. After rereading Mercy Thompson, October Daye and Harry Dresden alongside Anita, their comparatively limited role here is striking. Faerie eventually becomes structural in those other series: central to Toby Daye’s political and mythological world, a major concealed civilisation in Mercy Thompson, and an increasingly elaborate system of courts, bargains and obligations in The Dresden Files.

Hamilton does not build anything comparable in Bloody Bones. The fey broaden Anita’s supernatural taxonomy and complicate the case, but the novel does not immediately make them another enormous political system she needs to master. Given how crowded her world already is with vampires, lycanthropes, zombies, animators and other supernatural beings, the relative restraint works in the book’s favour.

The comparison becomes particularly interesting in hindsight because Hamilton later created the Merry Gentry series, beginning with A Kiss of Shadows in 2000. That series places Faerie much closer to the centre and leans towards paranormal romance from the outset. Its later existence cannot explain Hamilton’s restrained use of the fey in Bloody Bones, but it makes the contrast between the two fictional worlds more visible.

Anita herself remains the more constant source of friction. Almost everyone she meets eventually manages to irritate her, and she returns the favour efficiently. Clients patronise her, local police officers question her competence, supernatural figures attempt intimidation and Anita responds with sarcasm, anger or the implicit possibility that the conversation may become violent.

Quite often, the other person deserves it. The percentage of gruff, hostile and needlessly confrontational law-enforcement officers in Anita’s America does seem remarkably high. Yet after enough hostile encounters, the common element becomes difficult to ignore. Anita frequently enters an unfamiliar hierarchy expecting a contest and is talented at ensuring that one occurs.

The habit does useful narrative work. Someone underestimates Anita; she refuses the position assigned to her; the resulting clash tells us who possesses formal authority, who possesses practical competence and how much violence lies underneath the social order. Her abrasiveness is therefore both a character flaw and one of Hamilton’s recurring methods for introducing a new hierarchy.

Her firearms are another reminder that Anita’s practical world is specifically American. From my European reading perspective, what stands out is not that she arms herself—given the creatures she confronts, doing so makes perfect sense—but how little narrative explanation the gun requires. It belongs naturally beside the rest of her professional equipment. The supernatural danger may be imaginary, but the assumptions about what sensible preparation looks like come from the ordinary society surrounding it.

Power Creep and the Problem of the Climax

The other development that is increasingly difficult to miss is how quickly Anita becomes more powerful. Some degree of power creep is almost unavoidable in serial fantasy: a protagonist who never acquires new knowledge or capability becomes static, while one who grows too quickly risks making earlier threats irrelevant. The difficult part is giving the surrounding story somewhere to go.

Anita seems to climb unusually fast. Only five books separate the animator introduced in Guilty Pleasures from the woman operating in Bloody Bones, yet the difference in her supernatural authority, experience and confidence is already considerable. Each encounter teaches her more about what she can do, while proximity to vampires and other supernatural powers keeps widening the possible range of abilities.

Compared with the other series in my current reread, Harry Dresden’s growth feels slower and more burdened by obligations, while Mercy Thompson remains physically outmatched surprisingly often. Toby Daye eventually undergoes a dramatic increase in resilience, but Seanan McGuire compensates by moving more of the danger into grief, relationships and political obligation. Anita’s faster ascent instead places increasing pressure on the antagonist and, especially, on the ending.

If the heroine becomes harder to intimidate through ordinary supernatural danger, the final confrontation has to overwhelm the competence the rest of the novel has established. That may help explain Hamilton’s tendency towards enormous climaxes. The body count rises, the grotesque intensifies and Anita is pushed into circumstances designed to exceed what she has already survived.

This is where the early books often lose me slightly. Hamilton is extremely good at the approach: a disturbing crime scene, witnesses who conceal information, hostile local authorities, strange supernatural biology and the gradual realisation that several apparently separate problems belong together. I often enjoy that accumulation more than the moment when the machinery finally explodes.

Bloody Bones does not escape the pattern. Its conclusion is suitably horrible and certainly memorable, but it pushes into a louder register than much of the investigation leading there. Once the violence escalates far enough, some of the grounded pleasure of watching Anita work begins to disappear beneath the spectacle.

A restrained ending would not suit Anita Blake either. These mysteries deal with monsters whose reality eventually has to become physical, and Hamilton’s willingness to become grotesque is part of the series’ identity. The difficulty comes when each climax feels obliged to become bigger, nastier or more traumatic than the last. Escalation stops being a consequence of this particular case and starts becoming a debt inherited from the previous book.

Bloody Bones survives the landing better than The Lunatic Cafe because the investigation underneath it is stronger. Even when the finale becomes excessive for my taste, I remain invested in the problem that produced it.

A Return Without a Reset

Bloody Bones restores something I had missed in The Lunatic Cafe: Anita moving through a difficult professional investigation whose supernatural complications grow from the evidence rather than competing with it for attention. The mystery is brutal, increasingly complicated and much less intact in my memory than I expected. Anita remains abrasive, competent and almost magnetically attracted to people with whom she can have an argument.

Calling the book a return to early Anita Blake would nevertheless be misleading. The fey broaden the world. Anita’s power is already rising rapidly. Relationship and sexual politics remain active. Body horror is not waiting several volumes in the future. Even the tendency towards oversized climaxes is already firmly visible.

The series is not moving forward in a straight line, but neither is it moving backwards. Different versions of Anita Blake are beginning to coexist. The Lunatic Cafe gives more room to one possible future; Bloody Bones pulls the criminal investigation back into the centre. Later novels will move the balance again.

For now, Anita arrives for a job, encounters bodies that do not make sense, antagonises nearly everyone involved and discovers that the monster she thought she was hunting is only part of the problem. That is very close to the Anita Blake I remembered liking.

The more interesting discovery is how much of the Anita Blake I remembered coming later was already standing beside her.