10-K Books

It's never a good sign when your hero find the bad guy.... and promptly forgets who and what he is.

So that tells you a lot about "Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Guilty Pleasures #9," in which our doggedly idiotic heroine continues to bumble around on a crime that has already been solved. In the meantime, we're treated to horrendous dialogue, phallic weaponry, and a villain who is only slightly more menacing than our dense heroine herself.

Anita and her only friend Ronnie go to the Church of Eternal Life, bully a clerk, and almost get riddled with holes by a gunman. So Anita isn't in a good mood when she turns up to meet with Malcolm, the "Billy Graham of vampires," a stalwartly calm vampire whom she bombards with false accusations, wildly illogical speculation, and a bit of illegal gun-waving.

Of course, she already found out the bad guy, so all this is both pointless and counterproductive. Way to pad the plot.
After Malcolm finally ushers her out, Anita receives a series of calls -- turns out her prettyboy stripper is being tortured by Nikolaos. But when Anita arrives to bargain with Nikolaos, the childlike vampire reveals a new twist which is shocking to Anita (but not to any readers with functioning brain cells) -- and which might just get her killed.

By this point in the story, it's painfully obvious that Laurell K. Hamilton is treading water, and has no idea how to structure a mystery story. After blurting out the killer's identity, her heroine has several convenient amnesia attacks that prevent a tidy ending... but don't stop boring monologues or terrible dialogue ("I will prove to all that Jean-Claude is nothing! I am master of all!").

The author tries to keep things from being boring by throwing in a disposable gunman -- who lasts all of one page -- and lots of Anita harassing Malcolm on the slimmest, flimsiest evidence imaginable. Along the way, we get lots of Anita flirting with clerks, making funny "I'm so bad" faces, waving a gun around illegally, and repeating the same statements as she tries to get Malcolm to confess.

Unfortunately even Hamilton apparently finds this boring, because right afterwards we're treated to torture, interrogating, ripped abs, and long boring conversations about vampire servants. Unfortunately this rapidly descends into vampire camp, complete with evil laughter and ghastly dialogue. Apparently nobody told Nikolaos that lines like "You are bold, mortal... call me 'master' and you will have it!" will never get you taken seriously as a villain.

It doesn't help that Anita has the tiny immovable mind of the very stupid and stubborn -- when she decides someone is guilty, they must be guilty. And when she's not trying to bully secretaries or getting rescued by Ronnie, she's getting upset because there are vampire-related people who fail to quake with terror at her name. It's too bad Ronnie vanishes pretty quickly, because she was a refreshingly normal person.

Ron Lim's artwork is an improvement over the ham-thighed, yawning style of Brett Booth, but the stuff in here is still pretty silly. Anita appears to have a few pounds of collagen in each lip, Nikolaos is draped in floating toilet paper, and Winter appears to be an albino mutant wearing a Tarzan leotard and striped boxers. I only wish I was kidding.

The ninth part of "Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Guilty Pleasures" is a waste of time and tree, with our dense heroine keeping the plot stalled in neutral. And even campy vampires and bad dialogue can't save it.

NOTE: I know this is listed as the tenth part, but the cover and description are of the ninth.

I never received my order. I never received any reply when I inquired the purchase to Steven S. Zumdahl. The book was purchased and was charged to my card on 6/6/08. This is rediculous and should not have happened like this.

Tiffany

The book is not well written and has many flaws and supports myths about sex. Masturbation and incest are mentioned by the author as sole male prerogatives, while there is enough evidence to the contrary. Also, book seems to have a feminist undertone when the author mentions that male baby sitters should watch out implying that male baby sitters should not be hired.Rape and sexual harrasment are mentioned by author as a crime by a man against a woman. She conveniently forgets that all women have masturbated some time or the other, there are as many cases of female committing incest (on sons, nephews, cousins), females raping males and females harrassing males. Such views and support to myths about masturbation and incest by author who claims to be authority on these topics make this book a bad choice. Many better books available.

I've just read a few pages, and have already noticed that the translator arbitrarily skips entire paragraphs, shortens most sentences, and tries to avoid translating anything that might require some effort or creativity. I've searched online and it turns out that the Arabic "translations" of the other books in the series are just as abysmal.

Whether you're a native Arabic speaker looking to read the stories in your language, or you're practicing Arabic by reading it in parallel with English, I would not recommend wasting any time or money on Ahmed Hassan Mohammed's translations.

I would imagine that if anyone of Scholastic or Rowling's agents had checked this text, they would not have allowed its publication as an authorized translation.

I am a student of marketing research and of SPSS. I was thrilled to find what I thought was a book providing instruction in applied marketing research using SPSS. Was I wrong!...P>If you purchase this selection, you get a marketing research text book, and an attached diskette containing SPSS 10.0 student version. Sadly, I must report that the instruction in the book is in no way tied to the software!!

Given the fact that I'm not going to do multivariate without SPSS, this book has not helped me in a significant way at all. Here's an example for you: In the 25 page chapter on Discriminant Analysis, the entire amount of air time given to SPSS is as follows, and I quote: "In the mainframe version of SPSS, the DISCRIMINANT procedure is used for conducting discriminant analysis. This is a general program that can be used for two-group or multiple discriminant analysis. Furtnermore, the direct or the stepwise method can be adopted."

Putting SPSS aside, I cannot recommend this book as a stand alone marketing research learning tool. If you're anything like me, you need lots of excercises to test your understanding. This book contains only a couple of excercises at the end of each chapter, and the answers aren't in the back of the book. If you're studying independently, as I am, this is NO HELP AT ALL!!