Danse Macabre is 10th or 11th or something book of the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series. I've read another book of the series as well, called Cerulean Sins, and it was pretty good. It's the reason I picked Danse Macabre up in the first place. The characters are well developed, the plot is complex and good, and there was a bit of nookie.

Well. In Danse Macabre, there's a a lot of nookie, to the point of pissing me off. It seemed that not a single chapter went by without Anita having sex with people. That really started to bother me after a few chapters. I'm not one for smut.

Anyway, the world of Anita Blake is set in an alternate universe. Vampires and lycanthropes (werewolves, wererats, werelions, wereleopards, etc) are very much real and legal, and they have their own covens and pack and groups. They all have their own territories, and there are laws saying what they can and cannot do. The Anita Blake series focuses on the town of St. Louis and the vampire who runs it (called the Master of the City), Jean-Claude. Jean-Claude also runs the Circus of the Damned, which is like a freak show where humans come to see vampires and shape shifters.

There is a vampire ballet group, called Danse Macabre, which is touring the United States. Jean-Claude invites them to come to St. Louis, and he invites all the Masters of the City in the USA to attend the ballet. Vampires are very territorial creatures, and so, even though Jean-Claude's meanings are good, the visiting Masters may return the niceties. There are a lot of vampires who want to take St. Louis or try to exploit Jean-Claude and the lycanthrope groups who live there.

Also, not only is the ballet at St. Louis, but Anita is looking for a new pomme de sang. Anita isn't a vampire, but she inherited a sexual hunger - called the ardeur - from sleeping with Jean-Claude and him biting her. A pomme de sang is essentially food; for vampires it's a willing human to drink blood from, for Anita it's a willing human to have sex with. She needs a new pomme because she keeps accidentally forging metaphysical bonds with her other pommes. When a metaphysical bond is made, she is thus connected to that person and she doesn't get as much "food" from him. It's supposed to be impossible for a human to make bonds like these, but somehow Anita does.

So it's basically about how Jean-Claude and his group of people, including Anita, keep everyone at bay while dealing with other problems. Like the possibility of Anita being pregnant (the ardeur makes her have to have sex with everyone).

The plot in this book was really screwed up, and it (the plot) was hard to discern from all the sex. I don't think I'm going to be reading any more of Hamilton's books from now on. I will give Hamilton some points on characters, though. I love a lot of her characters, and they're really well sketched out. Very alive and deep.