Updating this blog has been dropping lower and lower on my 'important shit that needs to be done list'. But I will never let life defeat me from snarking books!
Messy, Dolph had called it. A master of understatement. Blood was everywhere, splattered over the white walls like someone had taken a can of paint and thrown it.
That's... That would be a lot of blood. If there isn't more then one person killed in this room I'm going to be mighty pissed.
We get a random bit of what colour the couch is even though it's covered by a sheet, which makes no sense. Either way Anita then gets all self-righteous on us by going on about how blood in real life is redder then it is in the movies. No, seriously.
Fresh blood is really brighter then you see it on television and the movies. In large quantities. Real blood is screaming fire engine red, in large quantities, but darker blood shows up on the screen better. So much for realism.
Oh Anita, you sheltered child. I've seen blood, lots of it because I was klutzy as all hell when I was younger. But I've never seen fire engine red blood before, even in large quantities (as she kindly repeats for us, no that isn't a typo) from my experience it's lighter red in smaller doses, the more blood you have the darker it appears.
But hey! I'm not a all knowing vampire slayer so what do I know??
We now meet Zerbrowski, detective and crowd favorite.
Detective Zerbrowski was about five-seven, curly black hair going grey, dark-rimmed glasses framed brown eyes. His brown suit was rumpled; his yellow and maroon tie had a smudge on it, probably from lunch.
If you haven't already guessed Zerbrowski is the comic relief in this book (besides the almighty Anita of course) I remember that when I was younger I liked this character. Lets see if my memory is as good as reality shall we?
We get a lot of back and forth between Anita and Zerbrowski about how she's a tough vampire slayer and looks like she's going to upchuck on the murder scene before having a complete turn around in conversation as he states that he wishes him and Kate (his wife) could afford such a flashy place to get murdered in.
Either way, Dolph is in the master bedroom so that's where Anita heads. Of course we get the necessary word chewing as she goes on that murder scenes are always to busy and crowded and how her plastic ID is on her jacket proving that she's with the police and that they shouldn't shoot her if her gun flashes or some such.
Anita pushes her way into the bedroom that is currently cut off by a group of coppers talking to each other about how there's so much blood and that there's apparently a body missing.
Yadda yadda, insert back story about how this squad is so squeaky clean new it still smells clean, that they pronounce the squad nick name as rip-it and that Dolph looks like a wrestler, Anita goes on to think that he was 'promoted' to this post because he was too good at his job, which... Makes no sense, but Anita Blake novel, so sure whatever. Cops get punished for being good at their jobs now.
We now get a cryptic part where Dolph refuses to tell Anita what's under the sheet as he wants her to tell him what she actually see's, not what see's been told to see.... So, yeah I'm too tired to really rip this apart and I'm fairly sure you're all doing a good enough job without my help.
He pulled back the sheet. It peeled away from the bloody thing underneath. I stood and I stared and all I could see was a lump of bloody meat. It could have been from anything: a cow, horse, deer. But human? Surely not.
Yeah, clearly Anita is the most experienced person ever to walk into this crime scene, her illusion isn't helped by the fact that she's forgotten her gear and has to borrow gloves from Dolph.
I pulled out two surgical gloves; one size fits all. The gloves always felt like they had powder in them. They didn't feel like gloves at all, more like condoms for your hands.
I'm... I'm going to assume that you've never felt a condom before in your life then Anita, cause trust me it isn't powder on the inside (at least that's my limited experience has taught me). Also, ALL surgical gloves have powder in them, that's why they feel like that... Plus, I've never come across one size fits all gloves before.
Anita proceeds to poke and prod the remains once Dolph has given her the all clear, random words trying to make this scene tormenting and failing at it mostly.
She comes to the conclusion that no weapon was used but would need the coroner to back her up on this (yes, I can see why it's so necessary to have her on the scene!)
She then gets Dolph's help to roll the corpse over, the chest cavity has been completely emptied. She stands back up and Dolph asks for her opinion, Anita replies that extreme violence was used (yah don't fucking say) but that by the lack of knife wounds means that this body was torn apart by hand.
Dolph then tells her that the rest of the bodies is in another room, when she asks him for more details he gets vague not wanting to influence her outlook or some crap like that. As she wonders towards the new room she bitches that when the police wanted her on retainer Bert was happy, stating that she'll learn a lot more about her field working with the police, but apparently all she's gained from her experiences are a greater variety of nightmares. Which either makes her way too qualified for this squad or extremely bad at gleaning new information off the mundane making her completely useless to this squad.
The new room turns out to be a babies room, I'm not sure why but every time a show/movie/book includes young children, unless it's very well done, just comes across as trying to hard to shock us with the horrid child abuse and horror.
This makes me think that LKH wanted to shock us so threw a young child murder into the mix... In an extremely poor fashion.
For example while there isn't much blood in the room, there is a blood covered bear with glassy eyes that follow her around as she inspects the room.
It turns out that Benjamin, aged three wasn't actually killed in the house and is currently missing. Anita cracks the shits, demanding to know why she was brought into this room if there isn't a horridly mutated body for her to poke at.
Dolph then leads her into the kitchen, it looks like something smashed its way into the house via the glass doors, now we get... Anita's theory on what happened.
"Glass breaks, someone comes in to check it out, probably the man. Some stereotypes die hard."
"What do you mean?" Dolph asked.
"The brave hunter protecting his family," I said.
"Okay, say it was the man, what next?"
"Man comes in, sees whatever crashed through the window (yes it was a glass door to begin with, why do you ask?) yells for his wife. Probably tells her to get out. Take the kid and run."
"Why not call the police?" he asked. (No, the H in 'he' isn't capped, why?)
"I didn't see a phone in the master bedroom." I nodded towards the phone on the kitchen wall. "This is probably the only phone. You have to get past the bogeyman to reach the phone."
But then why run into the master bedroom? Why wasn't the wife halfway down the street with her child?
Either way Anita determines that the monster broke in disabled the man but didn't kill him (there isn't enough blood in the kitchen) Then somehow the male woke up and ran into the master bedroom before being eaten.
This scenario makes no fucking sense! If I had a bogeyman between me and a phone, I wouldn't run into my damn bedroom I'd run out into the street and hope for the best, if I had a family I'd go out of my way to distract him. Running into a room that has no escape isn't what I'd call a good bloody distraction!
Dolph of course says that her theory makes sense.
Markiplier, awesome gaming channel
She takes it as a compliment either way and her head swells up to a dangerous size, at this rate I don't think she'll be able to fit into any buildings.
They come to the conclusion that whatever broke into the house wasn't alive because there's no blood on the glass, though vampires bleed like a normal person after awhile zombies do not. We learn that vampires cannot eat solid food making them probably the easiest vampires in the world to discover, hell even the Twlight vampires can eat food.
They are too far away from a cemetery for it to be Ghouls, which would've torn the furniture up anyways because they're destructive bastards.
No, we get more info on the rare flesh eating zombie that was casually brushed over in the first book.
Basically they're exactly like a normal zombie, but if you feed them then they rot slower, Dolph then asks if someone out there used this zombie as a weapon.
Anita says that it's possible, hell she could even do it but she wouldn't and no body she knows would either. Dolph states that the cops would be the judge of that and pulls out his note book, pen at the ready for her to give him the details he requires.
Anita starts giving him names but then freezes up, when she denies knowing anyone else Dolph smiles, puts away his note book and asks who she's protecting.
She states that she's protecting herself since she doesn't want this particular person pissed at her for any reason. Refusing to give up the name Anita states that she'll look into it and if this lead looks suspicious in anyway she'll let the cops know.
Dolph naturally takes this as well as a slap to the face, he then goes on to explain that this isn't the first time they've found bodies in this shape.
The first being a homeless drunk that passed out near a cemetery, figured ghouls got him before he could wake up. The second was a pair of teenagers, again they were close to a cemetery so they called in a priest and closed the case. Basically these are the laziest bloody cops in the entire world, you cannot claim that they're so run off their feet that they couldn't look a bit closer at these murders. Hell, why weren't the teenagers parents raising hell about this case being brushed under the rug??
Either way after this place he doesn't want another murder on his hands and is pissed that he made a mistake in not calling her in earlier so he needs the name to get this case on the way to being solved.
Anita ends up giving him the name Dominga Salvador claiming that she's the main Voodoo priest for the midwest and that no one will talk to the police about her. But that they might just talk to her because she runs in their circles or some crap.
Honestly at this point I'm quickly losing interest in this boring conversation.
It comes down to Dolph ordering her to report back to him ASAP after talking to Dominga before turning and walking back into the house.
Anita instantly turns her thoughts to the fact that she needs to go home and change before getting on with her job tonight.
The first raising is someone whose therapist thinks it'll be good for her to face her now dead molesting father, the other two are more 'normal' including a contested will and a witness in a court case died from a heart attack before he could face court, even though zombies aren't legal witnesses they're willing to pay to see if they can make it work.
Anita wonders out of the crime scene and into her Nova, while its outdated and she can afford better she doesn't see the point as it still runs. She whines that the steering wheel is too hot to touch so sits in the air con for awhile as the car cools down enough for her delicate little hands touch the steering wheel.
Sorry it's been so hot here lately that it can sometimes be hard to breath and your seat buckle turns into an awesome branding iron so I have no sympathy.
So goes on to ponder that if cops rock up at Dominga's door she'll go out of her way to find out who sent them on her, once she discovers it was Anita shit would hit the fan and things wouldn't end well for our heroine. Since Dominga is WAY more powerful then Anita in both community and raw brute zombie powers.
It also turns out that Dominga is unhappy with Anita because she's been going out of her way to avoid interacting with the Vaudun priestess and that community
I was going to ask the most powerful vaudun priest in the United States, maybe in all of North America, if she just happened to raise a zombie. And if that zombie just happened to be going around killing people, on her orders? Was I crazy? Maybe. It looked like tomorrow was going to be another busy day.
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