Contains spoilers for the previous books in the series, Guilty Pleasures and The Laughing Corpse.Circus of the Damned is the third book in the Anita Blake series, and I always seem to forget one of the plotlines, as it has several. At the start of the book, Anita has a meeting with two men from an anti-vampire group (Humans First). They try to convince Anita to give them the resting place of the Master of the City, so they can kill him. Although Anita is still royally pissed that Jean-Claude gave her two vampire marks, she doesn't betray his identity, and the two men leave, although they come back later for different reasons.
Anita then gets a call from Dolph, with the RPIT squad, to come look at a body with multiple vampire bites. To try to find out who is responsible, Anita visits Jean-Claude the next night, but he doesn't have much information. She does meet Richard Zeeman, a seemingly normal guy stuck hanging around the vampires, and also a shapeshifter named Stephen. When she gets home her assassin "friend" Edward is waiting for her, and threatens to torture her to obtain the identity and location of the Master.
And yet another person is looking for the Master--a rogue master vampire named Alejandro. He forces the first two vampire marks on Anita after attacking her. Along for the ride is Larry Kirkland, a new animator who Anita is training for Animators, Inc. There are a lot of events and storylines jammed into this one book, and occasionally it gets a little confusing.
The writing is about on-par with the first two books in the series; we get a bit more development of vampire lore and laws, and also a bit more on shapeshifters. There's some development of the relationship between Jean-Claude and Anita as well, including how drawn she is to him while simultaneously wanting to be free of him--with all the people seeking the Master, and all of them wanting him dead, will Anita finally get rid of JC? The threads of the different stories eventually tie together, and the climactic battle scene at the end is pretty damn cool.
One thing that does bug me, about the early books in the series in particular, is the attention to describing Anita's clothes. If it's something that serves a purpose, because for some reason her clothes are important in a coming scene, I'm all for it. But I don't need a description of every item of clothing, including her socks. The times when she's discussing the trouble with hiding a gun in womens' dress clothes has a point; pointing out the blue Nike swoosh on her socks just because is overkill.
In the end, it's tough to write a review of this book because it is so packed full. The narrative is hilariously sarcastic and cynical, as usual, and again we get everyday, normal sort of details that really flesh out Anita's world. I don't like it as much as the first couple of books in the series, but it still kept me reading.
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