n Laurell Hamilton's wonderfully noir horror thrillers, Anita Blake never knows quite what is going to turn up walking the mean streets she lives on. She really does not appreciate the sexual attentions of Jean-Claude, vampire Master of the city she lives in and proprietor of the Circus of the Damned. No matter how cute he is, he is dead, and Anita gets enough of dead people in her work as zombie raiser and vampire executioner. His friend Richard strikes her as entirely more her sort of thing--sweet, polite and a high-school teacher; yet she knows with an awful inevitability that Richard probably has secrets of his own. Add to this volatile personal mix vampires with ambitions to seize Jean-Claude's throne and mount anti-human pogroms, an immortal snake-woman with agendas of her own and a hit-man with a contract on whoever the Master happens to be at the time, and Anita's problems start to be as entertaining and suspenseful as ever. Hamilton takes us to dark caverns and overlit night-clubs, and to the darker places that live inside human and formerly human sexuality--her books are terrific supernatural thrillers because she is keen to explore sexual heat as well as terror and excitement