Laurell Hamilton, if you haven't heard, has created a new heroine, so she can write about something besides Anita Blake and vamps. Of course, Merry Gentry pretty much IS Anita Blake. She talks tough. SHe's short. She's cold-hearted, so they say. She even uses the EXACT same lines like "Never ask anyone to do anything you wouldn't do yourself." The focus is just a bit more on magic.

Oh yeah--she also has this obsession with kinky and rather incessant, promiscuous sex, just like Anita. While Anita came slowly into sleeping around, Hamilton solves this problem for Gentry by a simple device: Her Queen orders Gentry to sleep around. Therefore, the whole book becomes Gentry's amorous adventures. And it has to be deemed plot related because the whole plot is basically how many studs she can sleep with. Oh, yeah. As with Anita, all the studs are very studly, with washboard abs, incredibly handsome and, um, well hung, which Hamilton usually makes graphically clear.

The shame of it is that Hamilton is a compelling, page turning prose stylist. She's never boring. Yet, sometimes you look up and wonder, "Hmmm. Did I really want porn today?" Her books are increasingly kinky and non-stop, rather graphic, blow-by-blow sex. Not romance. Sex.

I'm no prude. I'd even enjoy one or two such scenes. But when they dominate the whole book, they cause the book to lose focus. They become the book--somewhere in here, there was the makings of a plot. It gets kinda derailed. I hope Laura isn't too frustrated at home. :)