<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Laurell K. Hamilton, born February 19, 1963, in Heber Springs, Arkansas, and raised in Sims, Indiana, is a New York Times bestselling author, with two hugely popular dark fantasy series underway.

Her breakout series, Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, follows a gutsy necromantic heroine who solves crimes, executes vampires and other monsters, and works a night job raising the dead, all the while juggling a very full dance card indeed. Anita's paramours include a master vampire, an alpha werewolf, were-leopards, and a chocolate-box of other sweeties. Titles in the series are, in publication order, Guilty Pleasures, The Laughing Corpse, Circus of the Damned, The Lunatic Café, Bloody Bones, The Killing Dance, Burnt Offerings, Blue Moon, Obsidian Butterfly, Narcissus in Chains, Cerulean Sins, Incubus Dreams, Micah, and Danse Macabre (publication date for the latter is June 2006).

There are six books to date in the Merry Gentry series, A Kiss of Shadows (2000), A Caress of Twilight (2001), Seduced by Moonlight (2004), A Stroke of Midnight (2005), Mistral's Kis (2006) and A Lick of Frost (2007). The heroine of this series is a faerie princess, Meredith NicEssus, heir to the Queen of Air and Darkness in the Unseelie Court.

With more than two million copies of the Anita Blake books in print worldwide, Hamilton sums up her success by saying, "I gave myself the toys from several genres: mystery, fantasy, horror, romance," and "I write exactly what I would want to read." Her combination of action--both gory and steamy--with supernatural elements has opened the gates to a subgenre of intense and romantic dark fantasy fiction.