Dead Ice by Laurell Hamilton

It’s hard to believe that this is the 26th book in this series, which I started back when the first one was published in 1993. I continue to care about the characters, and the cast has grown enormously since the early days.

This series started out as one of the first urban fantasy/paranormal series out there, and I will forever be fond of Anita Blake, who is tough but not unbelievably so, and has been through some terrible things yet strives to maintain her ethical beliefs even as more and more difficult choices keep coming her way. I’m not sure that I would be as engaged by these books were I to pick a volume up at random, never having read any of them before, but since I’ve been with them from the beginning, the series has become a part of my life. It just doesn’t seem like summer until I’m sitting outside on my deck on a beautiful day, reading the latest Anita Blake novel.

In this installment, the mystery element involves someone raising zombies, putting their souls back inside the bodies, and turning them into slaves for adult movies. The mystery is pretty thin, and I found it fairly obvious who the perpetrator was. Perhaps Anita is slow on the uptake because of the usual upheaval in her always fascinating personal life. I didn’t really mind - it was Hamilton's usual gripping read with plenty of fun moments among characters I’ve known for decades. I’ll be looking forward to the next one!

Books in the Anita Blake series:1. Guilty Pleasures 
2. The Laughing Corpse 
3. Circus of the Damned
4. The Lunatic Cafe 
5. Bloody Bones 
6. The Killing Dance 
7. Burnt Offerings 
8. Blue Moon 
9. Obsidian Butterfly 
10. Narcissus in Chains
11. Cerulean Sins 
12. Incubus Dreams
13. Micah 
14. Danse Macabre 
15. The Harlequin 
16. Blood Noir 
17. Skin Trade
18. Flirt
19. Bullet
20. Hit List 
20.5 Beauty
21. Kiss the Dead
22. Affliction
22.5 Dancing
23. Jason
24. Dead Ice

Dead Ice (#24 in the Anita Blake series) by Laurell K. Hamilton (Berkley Books, 2015)