Skin Trade opens with Anita receiving a message - a head in a box, sent from Vittorio. It took me a while to remember who Vittorio was, much longer than it should have being that I've been reading these book almost back to back. It eventually becomes very clear who he is, but some sort of hint would have been very helpful in those first few chapters. 
 Edward returns, along with Otto/Olaf and Bernardo. As I've mentioned in previous reviews, Anita tends to focus much more on her work and less on her sexual needs when Edward is around. Skin Trade is no exception. She and the other marshals race to kill Vittorio before he can come for Anita or continue his killing spree - with nary a sex scene in sight. In fact, the book goes a solid 375 pages before Anita needs to feed the ardeur. This will delight old school Anita fans and disappoint those who have come to love the more erotic side of this series. Personally, I liked the mystery first, sex later approach of this book but unfortunately when the clothes came off nothing else mattered. It seemed like since the sex had been absent for the majority of the book, the author felt she had to make up for it in the end. The sex became the story line in those last 100 or so pages, up to and including the final showdown with Vittorio. 
 It seems as though Hamilton is quite taken with the word flavor. It's popped up more and more often in the last couple books and just about takes over Anita's thoughts and dialogue in Skin Trade. In this book alone it is used while wondering the ethnicity of a character, which species of shifter someone is, what type of psychic ability someone has and what branch of the federal government a character works for. And those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head. It's just about constant and glaringly noticeable. 
 More than anything else in Skin Trade, I loved the Las Vegas SWAT team and wished we could have seen more of them in action. Their team, consisting of men with both psychic abilities and tactical training, would make a wonderful basis for a series of its own, even without Anita and the other marshals involved. I very much hope to see more of them in the future in some way. 
 Skin Trade isn't perfect, but it has great chase-the-serial-killer action. The return of the marshals and the addition of the SWAT team allows for a good focus on the mystery, weapons and the uses of psychic abilities in situations like these. Much of the Las Vegas weretiger stuff was more weird than interesting and the final get-the-bad-guy scene was a bizarre. Skin Trade is totally worth the read, even if only just for the men Anita's isn't sleeping with.