You’d think being the Executioner would be enough to warn the vampires off, but in the very first scene of Guilty Pleasures, Willie McCoy is sitting in Anita’s office asking for help. Apparently the undead are slow to take a hint. Anita ends the conversation by falling back on police protocol and her own personal rules. Anita doesn’t work for vampires, she kills them. Period.

It’s a good thing Anita has a code, because she’s about to progress down a nasty-looking path. Over the course of the books, the obstacles Anita encounters force her to up the ante—whether in terms of magic or her tolerance for violence—to cope with whatever emergency is at hand. Those crises are usually bloody. Each time she pushes those boundaries, she looks more like the monsters she’s fighting, whether they’re human or preternatural. Eventually the niceties of conventional morality start falling away. By Obsidian Butterfly she’s nearly level with Edward in the stone-cold-killer sweepstakes and has more monsters at her beck and call than a D-movie film director.

So why doesn’t all that power—both magical and plain old Edwardesque violence—push Anita wholly to the dark side? What’s stopping her from becoming the high priestess of lustful evil that Dolph seems to fear? The answer lies in who—and also what—Anita is.

Fun with Zombies

Anita does not begin life as an average, happy-go-lucky, white-bread kid—or at least she doesn’t stay that way for long. Anita’s mother—a first death that never quite gets laid to rest—bequeathed both dark beauty and  …