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serious flaw. We'd broken up after I'd seen him eat somebody. What I'd seen had sent me running to Jean-Claude's arms. I'd run from the werewolf to the vampire. Jean-Claude was Master of the City of Saint Louis. He was definitely not the more human of the two. I know there isn't a lot to choose from between a bloodsucker and a flesh-eater, but at least after Jean-Claude finished feeding, there weren't chunks between his fangs. A small distinction but a real one.
    There you go: another example of how flossing might have saved a relationship. As I said, Anita is torn between two lovers, so much so that she thinks of them all as a triumvirate: master vampire, Ulfric (wolf king), and necromancer. For Anita, being torn in two directions is not just a romantic dilemma but a condition of life in her (well, Hamilton's) universe:
    But I wasn't riding to the rescue because Richard was our third. I could admit to myself, if to no one else, that I still loved Richard. Not the same way I loved Jean-Claude, but it was just as real. He was in trouble, and I would help him if I could. Simple. Complicated. Hurtful.
    I wondered what Jean-Claude would think of me dropping everything to go rescue Richard. It didn't really matter. I was going, and that was that. But I did spare a thought for how that might make my vampire lover feel. His heart didn't always beat, but it would still break.
    Love sucks. Sometimes it feels good. Sometimes it's just another way to bleed.
    In addition to all that, Anita is conflicted about the very justice system that she serves, as Hamilton reminds us as Anita considers the news that idealistic Richard is relying on the truth alone to save him from the rape charge:
    It sounded like something Richard would say. There was more than one reason why we'd broken up. He clung to ideals that hadn't even worked when they were in vogue. Truth, justice and the American way certainly didn't work within the legal system. Money, power, and luck were what worked. Or having someone on your side that was part of the system.
    Do you think that Anita has enough inner conflict? Hamilton does not. On top of everything else, Anita is a committed Christian. Each new adventure deepens her conflict between her beliefs and her actions, and Blue Moon is no exception. Anita's many inner conflicts are a primary reason that she is so memorable. That Hamilton continually deepens those conflicts almost guarantees that her readers will come back book after book. And so they do.
    The narrator of Alice Sebold's literary best seller, The Lovely Bones, Susie Salmon, has a conflict that can never be reconciled. As the novel opens, fourteen-year-old Susie takes a shortcut through a cornfield on her way home from school. She is lured by a neighbor into an underground room, raped, and murdered. From heaven she looks down upon her family, her friends, and her murderer, observing their lives in the aftermath of her death.
    Susie's conflict? Sebold expresses it succinctly early in her novel as Susie describes her heaven (everyone has their own version), which is somewhat like her junior high school, but without teachers. Her textbooks are Seventeen, Glamour, and Vogue. She lives in a duplex with a roommate, but after a time the pleasures of paradise pall, as she explains to her intake counselor, Franny:
    Eventually I began to desire more. What I found strange was how much I desired to know what I had not known on Earth. I wanted to be allowed to grow up.
    "People grow up by living," I said to Franny. "I want to live."
    Franny states, "That's out." Susie's desire to live despite being dead is a powerful inner conflict that infuses and informs the remainder of Sebold's luminous novel. Susie's hopeless yearning is felt again and again as she watches her father come apart with grief, her mother escape into an affair, her sister grow and eventually marry, and her baby brother struggle with the legacy of a sister whose absence is in itself an impossible-to-ignore