2007: #59 – Strange Candy (Laurell K. Hamilton)
Book #59 was Strange Candy by Laurell K. Hamilton. The back of the book reads:
From a woman who marries into a family of volatile wizards to a couple fleeing a gang of love-hungry cupids, from a girl who seeks sanctuary in the form of a graceful goose to the disgruntled superhero Captain Housework, readers will revel in the many twists and turns of fortune in these fantastical fairy tales and lush parables. Even hardened vampire hunter and zombie animator Anita Blake gets blindsided by the disturbing motives of her clients in the new “Those Who Seek Forgiveness” and in “The Girl Who Was Infatuated with Death.”
I generally don’t go for short story collections, but I really enjoyed this. It’s the best Laurell Hamilton I’ve read since the appearance of the ardeur in the Anita Blake series.
A couple of the stories seemed too short, or even unfinished (“Those Who Seek Forgiveness”, “A Lust of Cupids”), but several were excellent and left me wanting more (“A Scarcity of Lake Monsters”, “A Token for Celandine”, “House of Wizards”, “The Curse-Maker”) . The remaining fell somewhere in the middle. There were four stories set in the world of her first novel, Nightseer, which I had never heard of. Now I need to seek it out!
If you like Laurell K. Hamilton for more than vampire and faerie sex, you’ll enjoy these stories.
Page count: 257 | Approximate word count: 93,068
2006 – The Forgotten (Faye Kellerman)
2005 – Eleven on Top (Janet Evanovich)
