Anita Blake and Jean-Claude struggle to sort out their love lives as a rogue pack of vampires moves into town, determined to take over the reins from the new Master of the City – and not incidentally, to leave a few corpses for the police to investigate in the process. What sounds like the plot of a novel is only another day in Anita’s harried life, and it doesn’t get any easier from there.
To investigate the murders, Anita is forced to descend into the world of the vampires once more. Jean-Claude is ever willing to help, but his help comes with the price of his company: deadly, seductive, and more tempting for our heroine than any vampire has the right to be. Yet the vampire marks that have saved Anita’s life in the past have also bound her to Jean-Claude, at risk of her soul.
Circus of the Damned takes Anita deeper into vampiric society, and tangles her deeper into Jean-Claude’s tangled plots. Anita knows from experience that the Master of the City is monstrous… but what about the alternative? Is the vampire you know better than the vampire you don’t?
There are problems with this novel which show up mainly in retrospect; the power level of the opposition is too high, relative to the degree of perceived threat. There are continuity problems with respect to the powers that are used. However, those problems are present primarily in retrospect; they do not pose a problem to the enjoyment of the book itself. Nor are they major problems with the series. The book remains a good read, and the minor flaws are the sort that only matter in a series with pretensions towards Literary Merit – pretensions which the Anita Blake series wants nothing to do with.
