"When a fifteen-year-old girl is abducted by vampires, it's up to U.S. Marshal Anita Blake to find her. And when she does, she's faced with something she's never seen before: a terrifyingly ordinary group of people--kids, grandparents, soccer moms--all recently turned and willing to die to avoid serving a master. And where there's one martyr, there will be more... But even vampires have monsters that they're afraid of. And Anita is one of them.."--...

Anita Blake's reputation has taken some hits. Not on the work front, where she has the highest kill count of all the legal vampire executioners in the country, but on the personal front. No one seems to trust a woman who sleeps with the monsters. Still, when a vampire serial killer sends her a head from Las Vegas, Anita has to warn Sin City's local authorities what they're dealing with. Only it's worse than she thought. Police officers and one executioner...

The leader of the local werewolf pack, Marcus, has come to Anita Blake, expert in the preternatural, to help him find eight missing members of his pack and she agrees to help him although her boyfriend, Richard, is in competition for leadership of the pack.

Anita Blake, the woman that the vampires call the Executioner, shares a bed with the Master Vampire of the City. So it hits close to home when an arsonist begins to target vampire-owned businesses all over town -- an arsonist who seems to want to destroy more than just property. It's the monsters who are in danger now, and it's up to the Executioner to save them from the inferno.

Introduces the character of Anita Blake, a young necromancer and vampire hunter, who is assigned by the master vampire of the city of St. Louis to find out who is killing the city's vampires and why they are doing it.