A review by octavia_cade
Club Vampyre by Laurell K. Hamilton

2.0

I came across this on a list I'm reading my way through, and I actually read the three collected volumes some time back, so this is just for my own records. The rating is an average of what I gave the individual books: Guilty Pleasures got three stars from me, mostly because I was impressed by the sense of pre-existing world. The Laughing Corpse and Circus of the Damned, on the other hand, only merited two stars each. Basically, I found the same issues cropping up in all three books. Firstly, Anita seems remarkably (if inconsistently) thick. In the first book I figured out the culprit long before she did; in the third Richard's identity was so obvious Helen Keller could have picked up on it... but it took our heroine forever to grasp. Secondly, the villains have a habit of being initially and genuinely threatening - and then prone to making mistakes so basic it was no wonder they lost in the end. I mean, I really enjoyed the world-building, but the characters are beaten so often with the idiot stick that it can get a bit frustrating to read.