When Anita Blake meets with prospective client Tony Bennington, who is desperate to have her reanimate his recently deceased wife, she is full of sympathy for his loss.
But what she also knows, though Tony Bennington seems unwilling to be convinced, is that the thing she can do as a necromancer isn’t the miracle he thinks he needs. The creature that Anita could coerce to step out of the late Mrs. Bennington’s grave would not be the lovely Mrs. Bennington.
Community Reviews
Does anyone else get the feeling that if Anita, or Merry, for that matter, decided to do something as quotidian and mundane as changing her brand of toothpaste, it would provoke a long, drawn-out, tortuous discussion/debate/conversation (with all her friends, lovers and enemies, and random passersby) about her motivations for the brand change, the inevitable or potential repercussions of the brand change, how her unexpected brand-changing decision upsets and discommodes said lovers, friends and enemies (and disconcerts various of the passersby), how the new brand and its minty freshness might prove useful or detrimental to them all in the 
future, and how exactly the new brand might be better incorporated into their various defensive and aggressive sexual acrobatics?
Ratings & Reviews
All, of course, while somebody is bleeding to death or being tortured, and all brand-change debate participants hold guns, spells, swords, knives, penises, and other various and sundry weapons at the never-exhausted ready.
I want to start off by saying that this wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. And it definitely wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I had the lowest of hopes for this one after reading Divine Misdemeanors (?) last year so maybe that’s why I liked Flirt more. Trust me though, it was nowhere near perfect and was also still far away from her earlier books in the series. I’m slightly wary though, could this be a sign of things to come? Will the Anita books continue to get better? I’m afraid to think this because I’ve been disappointed in Hamilton since Obsidian Butterfly. I’m afraid to hope.
«It made me hopeful, and I cursed it, because hope will keep you alive, yes, but it will also get you killed in ways worse than anything you can imagine. Hope is a bad friend when men with guns have you. But my lioness and their lions lusted after each other, sort of. Lust I trusted. Hope will lie to you, but lust is what it is; it never lies. Hope would keep me hoping, but lust might be a weapon I could use to divide them . «
And there it is. We get back to the Hamilton we’ve all come to know over the past few years. The one that latches onto a word or two and beats it into the ground. Someone please mail Hamilton a thesaurus. This passage isn’t a rarity either and it’s a constant reminder of what a lazy writer she has become.
I’m going to fast forward to the afterword now. I found it hilarious (in a bad way), sad, and frustrating and it made me want to deduct a star from my review score. She comes off as incredibly pretentious and arrogant and I honestly wish I hadn’t read it and just stopped reading when Anita’s story ended. She talks about how people ask her all the time where she gets her ideas and how she can write a whole book. I laughed out loud at this because she hasn’t written a whole new book in YEARS. If you’ve read anything by her it won’t take you long at all to find conversations, phrases, descriptions, scenes, and explanations practically pulled word for word from previous books. I can understand trying to explain things for new readers but come on, she doesn’t even try to hide the fact that she’s lifting whole passages and copied and pasted them into new books. And, the story in Flirt was only 158 pages long! About a third of the novella was stuff I had read in previous installments of the series. To me, this isn’t the sign of a strong writer, it’s the sign of a lazy one that’s struggling, and I find it comical that’s she’s trying to give advice to aspiring authors.