I was getting ready to work up a movie review from last night, when I realized I’d finished a book a few days ago and not ever reviewed it. I mean, it was the weekend, when I rarely review anything, so the delay is understandable. The forgetting, though, quite a bit less so. I’m not sure if I’ve ever done that before, or even come close. All of this would seem to indicate bad things about the book in question, and maybe reading between the lines they do, but my expectations for Micah were set so low that I walked away pretty happy about the outcome.

Yup, as intimated recently, I read another Anita Blake book. My outline created from the several most recent books states that a book in the series will start out with a mystery, quickly shift to sexual politics among Anita’s many were- and vampiric lovers, possibly also include were- and/or vampiric politics as well, occasionally hint at the mystery, and then draw it all together in the final 50 pages, sometimes very neatly and impressively but other times wildly implausibly. But the sexual politics is definitely the unfortunate-image-inducing glue that binds the whole plot together. I’ve pretty much typed this exact paragraph in a previous review; I revisit it here because Micah is not the usual Anita Blake novel. It weighs in at a light 250 pages, and with the font and spacing choices factored in as well could not be more than a third of the length of her last several books. The big question, then: what was removed from the formula to allow for this unexpected shrinkage?

My dread was that it would be all sexual politics (or possibly just sex completely divorced from any kind of characterization or plot), with no mystery or anything else. To my surprise, it was something rather more than that. There is a plot, and of course there are sexual politics, but mostly it was a chance to provide a little bit of character growth between Anita and her most recent and eponymous boyfriend. Actual growth, relative to the reader’s previous knowledge and between each other, as opposed to the typical jockeying for sexual political position that has often masqueraded as character growth lately. And the plot, bare bones though it is, wasn’t half bad. I once more believe that Hamilton can still write good mystery fodder, if she is willing to sit down and actually do it. Rumor tells me she probably isn’t willing, though. Neverthless, I retain hope!