It is a fun book to read, with its diminutive, feisty heroin, Anita Blake, a formidable vampire hunter who now focuses on being an animator, one who raises the dead. . She is a professional animator (one who raises the dead) and a licensed vampire killer in an alternate earth where vampires have come out of the closet (coffin?) and are active participants in American life. 
 The style is part detective potboiler, part mystery, and part fantasy with supernatural portents. It carries the reader along from its first page to its last, never losing its momentum. In fact, it leaves the reader wanting more.