Guilty Pleasures

Anita Blake works in St. Louis as an animator, a professional who raises the dead for a living. She also hunts vampires, and she is good at it: small, dark-haired and dangerous, she has a reputation for dealing with the undead who go too far. In this city, that is a real line of work.

Her routine changes when the most powerful vampire in St. Louis summons her with an unusual request. A string of brutal killings has shaken the city, and he wants Anita to find out who is behind them. Taking the job puts her in the orbit of the vampire community's elite, a world of seduction and menace where nothing is offered for free.

The case is only half the trouble. Anita is drawn to Jean-Claude, a master vampire and exactly the kind of creature she has sworn to destroy. Her attraction to him is the thing she fears most, and she has to face it while she hunts a killer.

Guilty Pleasures is the first novel in Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series. It mixes detective-style investigation, supernatural horror and a dangerous romantic pull, and it introduces a heroine who is as tough as the monsters she faces.