The first book in the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series, Guilty Pleasures was a fun read, but had a wealth of problems for me. 
 All of my gripes basically boil down to "why" as in "why is this happening, because I'm totally lost as to how this pertains to the plot?" Anita, our heroine, is an animator (she can raise people from the dead as zombies) and also vampire hunter. She is (quite forcibly) hired to find out who has been killing vampires. Everything up to the bachelorette party, I was fine with, then it took a turn into WTFville. Why did Nikolaos have Anita locked up with wererats? Actually, why did Nikolaos constantly show up to terrorize Anita? Doesn't she want Anita to actually, you know, find the murderer? Hard to do that when you're popping up all the time and interfering just to throw your weight around. Why did Nikolaos send Phillip to seduce Anita? What was the point of that? Distractions don't get the murderer caught any faster. Why did Anita have to go to the freak party with Phillip? I know she stumbles on Zachary being harassed by Theresa, but Anita could have been raising a zombie or something instead of the cringeworthy freaks getting all up on each other and then Phillip trying to seduce Anita in the bathroom. I was relieved when Anita decided "Fuck it. Come on, Edward, let's go kill some crazy vampires." Finally! 
 (view spoiler)[I figured out the murderer was Zachary when Anita saw his gris-gris and went into some big exposition about how it needed constant sacrifices to maintain it. That was a clue-by-four if I ever saw one, but Anita doesn't figure this out until Zachary tries to kill her near the end of the book. (hide spoiler)] 
 So, although I was constantly lost as to why pointless scenes were happening (and why men kept throwing themselves at Anita or she was forced to kiss both Phillip and Jean-Claude even though she clearly didn't want to), Guilty Pleasures was still engaging enough that I finished it in a day and I plan to read the next two (got them at a used book store). It's not really the height of literature and a lot of times the writing is simple, but that doesn't detract from the entertainment value.