Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #09 - Obsidian Butterfly

Laurell K. Hamilton

For the series over view and the other Anita Blake Vampire Hunter reviews click the following link. Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter

In one of the earlier novels Anita killed Edward's backup. Naturally Edward wasn't particularly impressed by this turn of events but gave Anita the benefit of the doubt and let her off with the promise of a favor. Should Edward at a later date require her services as backup she would fill the role.

This is the closest we have come to a novel about Edward, he plays a major role (as one would expect since it was his case), and we also meet his girlfriend and her two kids.

The main story line in this novel revolves around a case that Edward in his disguise as Ted Forester has been called in to help the local police with, In addition to two Anita he has called in two other backups. Obviously they are good people to have there as backup since Edward hired them, but each of them would also have to have a special area or expertise that would be somehow relevant to the job

The First is Olaf, a really big guy who is only there because his specialty is mutilating women. Since this case involves mutilation he is a natural choice because of his special "expertise" on the subject. The second backup is Bernardo, his area of expertise is being a pretty boy, this is an ulterior motive on Edward's part to steer Anita away from her current choice of Male companions.

The cover art on this particular novel is a major departure from the first eight. The over all composition is much the same with Anita doing something with an interesting background, the major difference is the disappearance of the gothangelthingo that normally sits behind the title and the relocation of the text that says "An Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Novel" to the top of the page. It can actually take a couple of seconds for this to register when looking at the cover.

What basically has been happening in this novel is that locals are being mutilated and left alive or sometimes torn apart totally and an investigation is going on, the police have called in Ted Forester(Edward) to help them solve the case and he has assembled a small team to help deal with it.

We meet the towns Master vampire, an Aztec Priestess with an unpronounceable name that translates into Obsidian Butterfly, which is also the name of a theme restaurant that she owns and runs by the same name. We also meet the local wolf pack and a bunch or majorly scary mercenaries.

The same person that trained Edward trained the head mercenary. That should be a fair indication of their scariness

I can't go in to too much detail about anything in this review as it would be very easy to give away a large portion of plot if I were to do so. This said I will mention an that there is an incident in a bar that leads to Bernardo being relieved of his pants, and as pointed out in a review I read the other day, Anita never meets any disappointingly small men.

I would have to say this is one of the better Anita novels, also the thickest to date. It will be interesting to see what size the next one is when it is released here, that shouldn't be too far off now.