Flirt by Laurell K. Hamilton

When Anita Blake meets with prospective client Tony Bennington, who is desperate to have her reanimate his recently deceased wife, she is full of sympathy for his loss. Anita knows something about love, and she knows everything there is to know about loss. But what she also knows, though Tony Bennington seems unwilling to be convinced, is that the thing she can do as a necromancer isn't the miracle he thinks he needs. The creature that Anita could coerce to step out of the late Mrs. Bennington's grave would not be the lovely Mrs. Bennington. Not really. And not for long.

Warning: Spoilers

Flirt is a short, quick read. Its title comes not for a business named Flirt, but because the dead woman was a serial flirt and because throughout the book, Anita Blake herself does a fair amount of flirting.

There is just one sex scene. In a lot of ways, considering the past few novels, this is a relief. In some ways not, because most of the interaction between Anita Blake and her captors revolves around sex. Naturally, they are insanely attracted to her and just as naturally, she rolls the mind of at least one. I am not surprised by this turn of events. She also acquired another man and that does surprise me. I thought she had enough. What is she going to do with him?

There are some interesting things. In the beginning of the books, a memory from her time with her grandmother surfaces, one that explains her hang-ups a little more. I suppose that is good, because the trauma from when her mother died, how she isn’t as blond as her family, how her college finance dropped her because she wasn’t white enough for his family, all that is getting a little old.

The most interesting thing is at the end, when something interferes with the zombies she raised. She raised a whole cemetery’s worth of zombies and some other power was there, something that interfered with her ability to control them. I suspect this something will figure prominently in the next novel. I also have a sneaking suspicion that Ms. Hamilton needed Anita to raise the whole cemetery in order to introduce this something, Anita being too powerful for this something to interfere if she had raised just one zombie. That may be why the client insisted on a human sacrifice and why Anita didn’t work all that hard to persuade him that she didn’t one to raise the zombie.

Grade: C+