The Harlequin (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, Book 15) (Hardcover)

by Laurell K. Hamilton (Author) "MALCOLM, THE HEAD of the Church of Eternal Life, the vampire church, sat across from me..." (more)
Key Phrases: vampire law, vampire servant, vampire executioner, Belle Morte, Marmee Noir, Master of the City (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
At the start of bestseller Hamilton's solid 15th adventure to star vampire hunter Anita Blake, Malcolm, the priggish head of the Church of the Eternal Life (the vampire church), is so desperate for help in dealing with the Harlequin, a troop of vampire enforcers and spies so feared vampires are forbidden to speak its name, he turns to those he considers sinful and corrupt—Anita and her sweetie, Jean-Claude, St. Louis's Master of the City. The Harlequin may have targeted Anita and the powerful triumvirate she has forged with Jean-Claude and Richard Zeeman (aka Ulfric of the werewolves). According to the rules, the Harlequin must make contact through delivery of a mask—white to indicate they are watching, red for pain, black for death. Anita receives a white mask, but the members of the Harlequin aren't playing by the rules. Shorter and more tightly structured than the previous entry in the series, Danse Macabre (2006), Hamilton's latest should prove more satisfying to longtime fans with its straightforward supernatural politics and steamy (but not extreme) sex.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"Hamilton just keeps getting better and better. -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Her books outsell any other current vampire fiction -- Publishers Weekly

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Berkley Hardcover (June 5, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0425217248
• ISBN-13: 978-0425217245
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (236 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #77,541 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #55 in	Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( H ) > Hamilton, Laurell K.
  #65 in	Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Authors, A-Z > ( H ) > Hamilton, Laurell K.

• This is item 15 in The Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

79 of 82 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Why the hell do I bother?, August 7, 2007

By	Aurie "Devourer of Books" (California) - See all my reviews

I guess we can't give zero stars. There should be a warning label on any new book LKH writes. And that warning should be: may cause loss of braincells and momentary blindness. I honestly think I got dumber just reading this.

Aside from the profuse amount of grammatical errors I find extremely hard to believe a professional editor could NOT find, it's a trite piece of literary vomit which reduces plot to nothing more than meaningless and unflattering sex scenes. The characters are flat, uninteresting morons who talk too much about insignificant dramas unimportant to the feeble attempts at plot.

LKH has reduced a strong, independent woman who had human inadequacies to a stretchy vagina which sucks the life out of those around her. She managed to mutilate the character of the vampire who dared to love her and instead made him a background fan boy with repetitive and meaningless one liners. And Richard has spent the last five books as nothing more than a sniveling idiot who annoys the reader whenever he is introduced into a scene. Every background character from previous books who were amazing and had personalities of their own, like Asher and Damian, are nonexistent. Meanwhile old friends like Ronnie and Dolph are made out to be enemies because they don't approve of Anita's rapid character change. If LKH continues to be under the fervent belief that her characters actually speak to her--are real to her to the point where she actually considers buying them Christmas presents--she might want to listen to the minor ones who went from good friends to enemies because they don't praise Anita's preachy monologues and are not willing to stand in the background and let her save them.

I will never be able to sympathize with Anita Blake's character again. I can't sympathize with a character who is so powerful that she doesn't have any vulnerabilities. What makes a good series author is one who understands that killing off characters makes readers realize their mortality, their fragility. Kim Harrison, for example, showed her understanding of this concept when she killed off a main character and love interest in her book For a Few Demons More (Rachel Morgan, Book 5). Harrison did it because it was necessary to plot development. LKH hasn't made the sacrifice of a good main character since book 1. Flash forward to book 15, The Harlequin. These characters have lost their voices, their individuality, to the point where in a group discussion, I can hardly even tell who's speaking. And the sheer amount of characters over the course of a 15 book series, with no one dead and hardly any leaving, makes each group scene simply painful to read. I don't connect to these characters anymore. I can't connect to characters who are invulnerable and who rely on a superhuman woman who is more villain than hero.

LKH wrote in her blog that she thinks those of us who hate her current literary efforts are prudes who don't like to read books which push the envelope. Bad furry sex and lesbian dream sex isn't pushing the envelope; it's absolutely shudder worthy and the writing alone makes me feel physically ill and clutch my head in extreme mental anguish. Someone, ANYONE, tell this woman to stop writing.

77 of 82 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars My time and money are too valuable..., June 20, 2007

By	C. Davis (Ruston, Louisiana) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I began reading The Harlequin with much trepidation. I am one of the original fans of the series who, I admit, has not been pleased with the latest offerings.
The first hundred pages or so were not that bad and had me thinking that maybe there was some hope for our heroine and the author. Alas, it just wasn't meant to be. The action in the book was limited to a few scenes, only a couple of which Anita actually participated in and frankly they weren't that exciting.
The sex scenes themselves were written better than they have been in the previous books, but they were pointless to the storyline and often had me thinking "what the heck was THAT all about?". And once the characters let the genie out of the bottle by having sex that was all the book rotated around; not necesarrily actually having sex, but talking about sex, thinking about sex, arguing about sex, having sex again... you get the picture.

The Harlequin (as the bad guys) could have been scary and just weren't, especially at this weird moment at the end when everyone stood around talking about their "feelings" while the bad guys just stood around and twiddled their thumbs. Of course, Anita used her metaphysical mojo and miraculously vanquished them just in the nick of time.

I also found myself suffering from deja vu. Every chapter had at least one character repeating some cliched phrase from previous books over again. There were some conversations that I swear were lifted straight from the other novels. Maybe this is so new readers can learn the characters but it was pretty annoying.

Probably the worst thing for me though is that I just don't like the characters anymore. I used to be able to immerse myself in an Anita Blake book to the exclusion of everything else around me because I liked the characters and the world they lived in. The charcters were original, they had thier own personalities, and the stories were exciting.
Anita has become a self-righteous bully, Richard is a whiny bas**rd, and apparently Anita carries the male bits of all the other male charaters around in her pockets because they are all wusses and defer to her in everything. Dolph is a mean spirited bigot. Edward is OK, but he's not the same now that he's in LUUUUVVVVV. About the only charcter that was remotely likeable was Zebrowski and he was there for about 2 pages. There is no conflict among the characters, Anita says jump and the men say "how high". The plot was at least recognizable in this book but there was no tension and no mystery.

I used to wait eagerly for the next Anita Blake book to come out, would buy it on the release date and have read it at least twice within the first two weeks of owning it. I got The Harlequin from the library and am very pleased that I didn't spend any money on it. This will be my last Anita Blake book. I've tried to wait around for LKH to get her act together but it doesn't look like that is going to happen so I'll be spending my time and money elsewhere on more deserving books and authors.

413 of 468 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars "What's a little sex between allies?", June 6, 2007

By	E. A Solinas "ea_solinas" (MD USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The Anita Blake series started off well, continued for awhile, then took a sharp plunge down into the literary abyss of bad porn.

Well, "The Harlequin" scrabbles PARTLY back out of that abyss, but Laurell K. Hamilton's fifteenth Blake book still suffers from a surfeit of squickly sex, constant sexual ramblings, and a promising plot that gets swamped by the sex-with-Anitacentric politics of vampires and weres.

First a vamp cleric tells her of a threat so terrible that he can't name it, then a movie night with Nathaniel leads to a strange warning -- a white mask. Jean-Claude reveals that it's the warning of the Harlequin, a cruel vampire police who can warp their victims' minds. And apparently Anita and her string of adoring lovers (plus the still-upset Richard) have upset them.

And the politics of the situation are getting quite nasty, with alliances between weres and vamps getting nasty as they try to all have sex with Anita for power and influence, and Anita repeatedly getting hit by her various "beasts." And if they don't manage to kill the Harlequin soon, then Marmee Noir will reawaken -- and the Harlequin will be working for her.

"The Harlequin" sounds promising at first -- it's almost a hundred and fifty pages before Anita has sex with anyone. It's been several books since Hamilton could boast a length like that, and at first glance it seems to be promising a return to prior form.

Unfortunately, the sexless parts are duller than actual sex: talking/remembering/agonizing about sex. There's two long chapters devoted to Nathaniel wanting Anita to tie him up and hurt him during sex, and Anita getting squeamish about it. And halfway through, she starts having public ardeur sex, bloody sex, lesbian vampire dream sex, feathery sex, and Hamilton seems to be paving the way for sex with Edward's sixteen-year-old stepson.

None of this would matter quite so much if the plot were good -- and some parts of it are excellent. Edward's family vs. job struggle, the were politics and their tenuous relationship with the vampires, the fight between Richard and Jean-Claude, and the whole threat of the Harlequin itself is pretty thrilling, and pared down, it could have been a truly excellent book.

Unfortunately, these promising plots are bogged down in -- you guessed it -- sex. Everyone wants sex with Anita, and chapters of arguing about who gets to is just stupefyingly dull. As if that weren't bad enough, Hamilton takes another jab at her former fans, by announcing disdainfully that, "God hasn't forsaken me; it's just that all the right-wing fundamentalist Christians want to believe he has." Nice that now Anita is God's mouthpiece.

And though Anita doesn't come across near the levels of arrogance in books past, she still comes off as annoying, hypocritical (she likes rough bloody sex, but squeaks at the idea of tying a guy up?) and ridiculously superpowerful. While expecting us to like her, Hamilton has Anita trying to bully a werelion into having sex with her, and having him bumped off when he stays faithful to his wife.

As if that weren't enough, turns out that she's also powering anyone she has sex with. The long-haired, anime-style femmemen worship and fight over Anita, and the few who don't are either banished again (Richard) or are pale shadows of their former selves (Edward).

"The Harlequin" takes some baby steps back toward quality, but the obsession with sex and long-winded arguments drown the promising plot points. Better keep the mask on this one.