A Terrible Fall of Angels by Laurell K. Hamilton

 

ANGELS WALK AMONG US, BUT SO DO OTHER UNEARTHLY BEINGS IN THIS BRAND-NEW SERIES BY #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR LAURELL K. HAMILTON

Meet Detective Havelock, a man with the special ability to communicate directly with angels. A former trained Angel Speaker, he devoted his life to serving both the Celestial beings and his fellow humans with his gift, but a terrible betrayal compelled him to leave that life behind. Now he’s a cop who is still working on the side of the angels. But where there are angels, there are also demons. There’s no question that there’s evil at work when he’s called in to examine the murder scene of a college student—but is it just the evil that one human being can do to another, or is it something more? When demonic possession is a possibility, even angelic protection can only go so far. The race is on to stop a killer before he finds his next victim, as Zaniel is forced to confront his own very personal demons, and the past he never truly left behind.

 

A Terrible Fall of Angels (Zaniel Havelock, book one) by Laurell K. Hamilton

Start date: September 6, 2021

End date: September 7, 2021

Rating: 3 ½ out of 5 stars

There was so much, for lack of a better term, stuff packed into this novel. It’s an ambitious first novel of a series. I feel like Hamilton had a lot of ground she wanted to cover to establish this story and subsequent novels, and she packed it all into one nearly 400-page book. It’s not necessarily a bad thing but it’s not a great thing either.

Detective Zaniel Havelock works for the Metaphysical Coordination Unit (colloquially known as the Heaven and Hell unit), which is a part of the police department that deals with crimes with a supernatural bent. Zaniel is called to the scene of a murder, and what bumps the crime to Zaniel’s division are the angel wings found scattered across the crime scene. It becomes clear to Zaniel that the murderer was no angel when a live angel appears and tells him that the victim was killed by something unknown, something not demonic “but it should be” (Hamilton 18).

Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K. Hamilton

No one knows the dark desires of the soul better than #1 New York Times bestselling author Laurell K. Hamilton. In Guilty Pleasures, she introduces Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter. Anita's small, dark, and dangerous. But when the city's most powerful vampire comes to her for help, Anita is faced with her greatest fear--a man capable of arousing in her a hunger strong enough to match his own...

"Why should it surprise me that I was alive?...

There on the right side of my neck was the real thing...

Tiny, diminutive fang marks. Nikolaos [had] contaminated me...

I bet she thought I'd be scared of her. She was right on that.

But I spend most of my waking hours confronting and destroying things that I fear. A thousand-year-old master vampire was a tall order, but a girl's got to have a goal."

Guilty Pleasures (Anita Blake, book one) by Laurell K. Hamilton

Start date: December 18, 2014

End state: December 19, 2014

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Content warning: torture, sexual violence

The only reason the Anita Blake series made it on my reading challenge list was because of the rumors I had heard about the books. I’ve always been told that Laurell K. Hamilton writes graphic, detailed sex scenes. I was embarrassed the first time I ever read a story in which characters engaged in sexual acts, but I’ve come a long way since then. Now I love a well described sexual encounter and pray for them in the novels in which the characters have sizzling chemistry. I put the first book in the Anita Blake series on my list so I could try out the series to see if I liked it. After finishing the entire Hush, Hush series within the past three days (you heard read me right—I binged), I needed a satisfying sex scene to alleviate all that tension so I turned to the author I heard so much about. I won’t ruin the Hush, Hush series for anyone but if you’re looking for something steamy, you might want to look away from young adult novels. Silly me for not accounting for the target audience in my expectations of the books. Never again!