Skin Trade

Skin Trade is a novel by the American writer Laurell K. Hamilton, published in 2009. It belongs to her long series about Anita Blake, who divides her working life between raising the dead and hunting those who kill.

The book begins when a vampire serial killer sends Anita a grisly souvenir from Las Vegas. The gift is a message as much as a threat, and it obliges her to go to Nevada and explain to the local authorities what they are dealing with.

What she finds is worse than the letter suggested. Ten police officers and an executioner have been killed in the city in ways that only the supernatural can account for, and Anita is joined on the case by three other federal marshals, among them the ruthless Edward, who has always had her back. Close to the bodies she senses the presence of weretigers, which are very powerful in Las Vegas, and the investigation becomes a matter of not offending the wrong faction while stopping the killer, with the odds shifting every time she identifies a suspect.