Note: I did use dictation software for part of this so if there any errors well… even with me going through and editing… I am sure I missed the opportunity to correct things.

Returning to the Anitaverse, our convenient witness has gone off to give a formal statement about what she saw and experienced with the vampire on fire. While the young woman does not seem to think anything is amiss, Anita makes it clear in her internal monologue that this is just the first step on analyzing and unpacking whether or not she was responsible for a murder.

One of the things I find really interesting that shows up in this chapter, is the use of texting on the page. Part of this book when Anita texted one of her loved ones, her internal monologue is what carried that information to us. We got the details of the texts but not the words themselves. In this book, in this chapter specifically, we actually see the text messages on page with Anita texting back and forth with Ethan, one of her guards and possibly lovers.

It’s a little thing that isn’t even new — texting on the page is used to convey emotion and narrative without using direct dialogue in a bunch of novels I’ve been reading across the past decade and a popular YA series was built around texting –but it almost gives me hope for Hamilton bringing the series into the 21st century proper. Anita is a character who used a pager well past the point where people used pagers.

I was in high school, having never seen a pager in my life, but Anita was still getting pages to come to the different crime scenes in Saint Louis. Any update is a good update here, because like I said last time one of the big issues with the Anita Blake series for me is that it really lacks a sense of time and place.