Search - Circus of the Damned (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, Bk 3)

Great story! Did a really good job of keeping you on your toes trying to figure out who exactly is the bad guy. The characters/creatures in the story are wonderful. Hamilton is easily becoming one of my favorite authors.

As promised, each book in this series just keeps getting better and better! The characters personalities are fleshing out more and more. It makes you want to read all night long to the very (exciting) end! Once I finished this book, I immediately grabbed the next book in the series (Lunatic Cafe book 4) off of my bookshelf and began reading! These books are a must read and Circus of the Damned is wonderful!

but thankfully not one of her later sadistic works of animal pornography and sheer solipsistic degradation.

In short, readable if not a great book. Avoid the later books unless you're into the nastiest sort of porn imaginable, stuff that if photographed would get you arrested anywhere in the country. I still cannot believe that WalMart will sell this crap!

Loved it!

I am really enjoying my rereading of this series. Going back to the beginning of the series has reminded me why I continue to read along even though it has morphed into another beast entirely. These early books were so great because the men and the sex weren’t the focus of the entire freaking plot.

Here Anita is still working as an animator and an assistant to preternatural police force. Anita has a full plate, as usual, after a full night of corpse raising, she’s then hounded by members of “the vamp hater Church or somesuch” to give up the resting place of the Master of the City (Jean Claude), then a body turns up drained by what appears to be a rogue pack of vamps which leads her to The Circus of the Damned and into close proximity with vampire Jean Claude, a sexy vampire she’d rather avoid. He’s been trying to make her his human servant but she stubbornly refuses, even when it means putting her own life in jeopardy. There’s a whole lot of that “Ma petite I have marked you, you are mine” “I kill vampires, I don’t serve them” nonsense going on. She must train an apprentice animator, face down an angry lamia, crazed humans, out of control zombies and deal with a dangerous master vampire. It sounds exhausting but I have to hand it to Hamilton because I was never lost. We’re also introduced to Richard when he was still sweet and sexy and not quite so angry and rigid as he appears in the later novels..

Once again there is way too much focus on clothing (who cares) and the gun descriptions (snore). Personally, I am still not dying to discover what color Anita’s Nike swishes will be every other page and if the match her t shirt. I already know that she is not a girly-girl because it’s mentioned over and over. We all know Jean Claude has a preference for lacy floofy blouses and his own nipples. Do we need to be constantly reminded of this? It’s a little painful to read this stuff the second time around but the quick pacing and intriguing characters carry the book for me and I enjoyed the many plotlines here, none of which focus on sex I might add.

Despite a lame-ass villain and too much arguing from Anita, I enjoyed this as much as the previous two in the series.

Love this book and pretty much any book by Laurell K Hamilton.