Rating - ⭐⭐
"Anita Blake is small, dark, and dangerous. Her turf is the city of St. Louis. Her job: re-animating the dead and killing the undead who take things too far. But when the city’s most powerful vampire asks her to solve a series of vicious slayings, Anita must confront her greatest fear—her undeniable attraction to master vampire Jean-Claude, one of the creatures she is sworn to destroy."
Guilty Pleasures by is an urban fantasy novel by Laurell K. Hamilton and is the first entry in the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series.
My 2-star rating may be generous because I didn't enjoy this, and the only reason I kept going was because I was reading this for a reading challenge. On top of this just not doing anything for me, there were several things that bothered me.
For one, there is Anita. Things just didn't add up with her character because for someone called The Execution, I expected her to be rather strong, but she kinda sucked. She was a few steps behind in pretty much every situation she was in, and when things got bad she all she did was scream 'nooooo!' every time. She was also only 106 pounds... How she had the strength to do anything physical and how she didn't break any bones the entire time is beyond me.
Secondly, the synopsis for this is rather misleading. I was expecting some kind of enemies to lovers situation going on with some murder mystery in the background. Jean-Claude, however, was barely in this. He shows up a bit in the beginning and in the end, but for the entire middle section of the story, it was all about Anita and Phillip, who I didn't care about.
Finally, there were a whole lot of non-consensual shenanigans going on. The vampires are able to kind of influence people and can make them servents, which, you know, is not cool. There were also small mentions of sexual assault almost happening.
I wanted to DNF this the entire time so needless to say I will not be reading the however many books come after this.
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