Anita Blake is a monster killer, a sometimes murderer, a once-in-awhile torturer. She’s an executioner of vampires—the shortest executioner of vampires in the United States—but don’t let that fool you: Anita Blake has the highest kill count of any vampire executioner in the nation, possibly the world. And that’s just counting the legal kills.

She’s not exactly someone you want to take home and introduce to your mother, someone you imagine making dinner, walking the dog, or dropping the kids off at soccer practice. She’s been called a sociopath, a zombie queen, and coffin bait. She’s a necromancer, a master vampire (somehow without really being a vampire), a succubus, and the human servant of the Master of the City.

She is not your girl next door.

And she doesn’t want to be. She never has. At the beginning of the series, Anita prefers coming home to an empty apartment when she’s done raising the dead for the night. It’s quiet there: peaceful and private. She can wash off the goat’s blood and the zombie goo with a hot shower, cuddle with her stuffed penguin, enjoy having a kitchen she doesn’t cook in—a kitchen no one cooks in.

Her ideal pets? Fish. As she says: “You don’t walk them, pick up after them, or have to housebreak them. Clean the tank occasionally, feed them, and they don’t give a damn how many hours of overtime you work” (The Laughing Corpse).

No one knows what happens to the pet fish. They disappear in later books. They never  …