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 mena...