This book was expertly crafted and very well written despite the fact that I didn't quite love it. I was at first a bit let down by how simple it seemed in terms of morality when I had expected something more ambiguous, but then Serena's backstory is revealed who I found to be the strongest and a much more morally complex figure than the other two. Vicious is a gloriously twisted way of looking at superhero movies. Eli could have been a superhero from an alternate, unhinged reality. The central theme of the story came together in a way that was deliciously gradual. The found family that forms in this book is as heart-warming as any found family involving a clinical sociopath, his ex-prison buddy and a 13 year old girl with a zombie dog would be. This book had the minor issue of Victor all conveniently ending up in the right place and coming across the right person for the story to begin, but it's an easily forgivable issue in this otherwise tightly woven narrative.

I would say though, I found the inclusion of rape in this story to be much harder to get past, because it is never even acknowledged as such. I also think that Schwab dropped the ball ever so slightly at the end. It would have been a neater story if Sydney's powers had come with some limitations, if, for example, it was discovered that she could not use it on the same person twice. There was an exciting build-up to the final showdown between Victor and Eli but not a sufficient payoff. I know that this author's treatment of women in both of these series has received criticism, but I personally found it to be much better in Vicious than it was in the Shades of Magic trilogy, which does slightly worry me because Vengeful is supposedly more ~empowering~, and I've seen Schwab's idea of empowering before and I'm not impressed. At any rate, a sequel to this seems unnecessary so I won't be reading it anyway.