A Terrible Fall of Angels (Hamilton)

A Terrible Fall of Angels
by Laurell K. Hamilton (2009)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This was a book club pick. It received mixed reviews. I listened to it while walking, and then read the ebook when I was done with the previous one. This made the reading go a little faster. Reading it did clear up one point, a little.

I've previously read a single book in Hamiltion's Anita Blake series, which may or may not be in this blog. (There was a several year gap when I didn't maintain this page.) But I was game to start a new series.

The book started strong and introduced a lot of elements. Then it dropped the ball on most of them. I slogged through the middle to get to the end. If this book had been a ten-episode Netflix series, the beginning would've been two episodes, the ending would've been two episodes and the six episodes in between would've been a lot of world-building and filler.

Don't get me wrong: I liked the world-building, but it seem like much of it was presented for future use. Likewise, many of the characters we're introduced to in the beginning just fade into the background. Others we just wished had do soon. (In particular, no one in the book club liked his estranged wife. While we all appreciated the break in the action to have couples' counseling, the wife didn't come off as a likeable character after that.) Another problem with the worldbuilding (as pointed out but a book club member) is that she retconned the rules in the same book. She didn't wait until, say, book three or four to change the rules.

Personally, I thought it got a bit repetitive, sometimes repeating information within the same chapter. A couple of those chapters, with side characters out of nowhere, just dragged on too long.

One thing, I won't forget that the main character's name is Havelock, because I was reading the Expanse book where a different Det. Havelock made an appearance. (He's in books 1 and 4 of the Expanse, and that's as far as I've gotten there.) I wouldn't say the other characters aren't important enough to list, but I've fallen behind in posting these mini-reviews (it's September, but I'm backdating it to the month I read it in for my own personal records), and if I really needed to know, I'm sure I can find it on that wiki -- you know the one.

Would I read another one? Maybe, but I would hope it's a little tighter than this one was.

Guilty Pleasures (Hamilton)

Guilty Pleasures (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #1), by Laurell K. Hamilton, 1993

Before Buffy was slaying vampires on television, Anita Blake was executing them in a series of novels.

Anita is an Animator, she has the ability to raise the dead, creating zombies who can, briefly, retain their memories and personalities. She also kills vampires, but there's a catch. Vampires have are people, too, you know. They have rights, and they can only be put down by court order. Otherwise, they stay and operate in their own districts of the city. Guilty Pleasures is just your typical vampire nightclub. It isn't hiding anything nefarious. Of course, it's not.

As the story opens, Anita is being hired by a vampire whom she recently knew as a person. They want her to look into a series of unsanctioned vampire killings. She's not a private detective, but they think that she knows her stuff. Who better than someone who kills vampires to deal with another vampire killer.

Oddly enough, even though she isn't a private detective, that didn't stop me from reading the book if, in fact, she were. Actually, in my mind, the narrator had the same voice as the woman who reads the Sue Grafton, "Kinsey Millhone" audiobooks. It made for an interesting but unintended mash-up. I enjoyed the book, although I wasn't riveted. I took my time, mostly reading it on the trains, and occasionally before sleeping. I would recommend it if you like your vampires straight-up evil, manipulative and oozing with power. They may have the rights of humans, but they aren't trying to be human.

I found the first five books in the series on a shelf at the Salvation Army Thrift Shop. Unfortunately, I only picked out the first book because I didn't want to spent that much money upfront on a series that I knew nothing about, hadn't heard of before. For all I knew, I was buying "chick lit". You may like that sort of thing, but it's not high on my summer reading list (even if I did buy it in the springtime). It's probably better this way because buying the first book forced me to read it sooner so I could decide to go back for the others before it was too late. A good plan, but I didn't move quickly enough -- someone picked up the rest of them before me.

By the way, had I bought all of them, they could still be sitting there on my shelf. I have bought quartets of books only to return them a year or two later, unread.

Two notes about the series:

First, they seem to have been popular, despite my not having heard of them. I asked online if anyone nearby had copies of the books. I got quite a few responses. Two guys I might've expected had had them, but they're too far away to borrow the books (the tolls just to Jersey are over $20, and let's not forget the gas!). And two women who I wouldn't have suspected both told me that they had read them when they came out, but neither had them any more.

Second, be warned that the series changes after the fifth or sixth books. Fans debate whether or not the change was for the better. What was the change? I don't know, but I could guess. And if I couldn't, my sister's response of "LOL! Oh, yeah, they changed!" tells me that it's probably not in a direction I'm wanting to follow.

That said, if I can find these books, I might have 4 or 5 more good reads this summer.