Anita Blake

If you love a good mystery and a touch of the supernatural, Anita Blake may just be a great book series for you.

Anita Blake may be small and young, but vampires call her the Executioner. Anita Blake is an Animator, who raises the dead for a living, as well as a Vampire Executioner and U.S. Marshal for the Regional Preternatural Investigation Team. She lives in St. Louis, were not only do wereanimals and vampires walk the streets, they have rights as citizens.

Necromancer: Anita is one of the most powerful animators operating commercially. She can raise zombies, sense the dead, raise vampires in daytime, sense vampires and lycanthropes, estimate their power level, the approximate age of vampires, has good night vision and can resist (at least partially) mental influence from vampires.

Combat Training: Anita has a black belt in Judo as of the first book. She works out regularly with her best friend Ronnie "to be able to out run the bad guys" when she needs to. She credits Edward for much of her training in weapons, primarily handguns and knives.

Supernatural Experience: Anita holds a bachelor's degree in preternatural biology and is a trained vampire executioner. She also has a well-worn two-semester background in comparative religion. These courses often told her useful tidbits about other cultures/mythologies, and throughout the series she learns vastly more about vampires, lycanthropes, and other preternatural creatures. RPIT relies on her for information about a wide variety of supernatural entities.

The Anita Blake series spans twenty novels so far. This is the complete list in chronological order. I do highly suggest reading the novels in order since the time-line for the story flows so closely from one book to the next.

1 Guilty Pleasures
2 The Laughing Corpse
3 Circus of the Damned
4 The Lunatic Cafe
5 Bloody Bones
6 The Killing Dance
7 Burnt Offerings
8 Blue Moon
9 Obsidian Butterfly
10 Narcissus In Chains
11 Cerulean Sins
12 Incubus Dreams
13 Micah
14 Danse Macabre
15 The Harlequin
16 Blood Noir
17 Skin Trade
18 Flirt
19 Bullet
20 Hit List