"Zoe, you didn't really read two books from the same series in one day did you?" you ask. No, I read THREE books from the same series in one day. I would have posted the other two reviews last night, but after plowing through three books and roughly 820 pages in a little under ten hours, I was just slightly brain-fried and in need of sleep.

So, in my review of the last book in this series, Midnight Alley, I said I couldn't see how they could keep making the stakes higher for everyone involved before one of the books had to back down on the danger level. Well Feast of Fools isn't the book to do it, and neither is the next book, Lord of Misrule. Both ended on such huge cliffhangers that I literally HAD to buy and start the next volumes to find out what happens next. As soon as I'd had my coffee made this morning, I bought book 6, Carpe Corpus. There's 15 books in this series, and at the rate I'm going, I expect to be done within a few weeks, provided my debit card doesn't run out of funds first.

So, what could raise the stakes higher after the revelations in the last book? Oh, how about a war among the vampires? A new arrival in town, Bishop (or Mr. Bishop, as both get used throughout the book a lot) claims to be Amelie's father, and at his arrival, Amelie and all the elder vampires begin advising Claire and friends to keep their heads down and let the vampires sort this out. Which would be easier if one of Bishop's lieutenants wasn't actively stalking Shane with nothing short of rape on her mind.

And at this point, aside from Claire's dad, not one father in this series is really worth a shit. Eve's dad was ready to sell her off as meat at eighteen. Shane's dad was an abusive drunk long before he became a vampire hunter, and Bishop is the classic male vampire, eternally fixated on his place of superiority over everyone else. Nobody is good in this town, not even the people who are aware of the situation and just turn their heads to keep up the motions of life.

Which brings me to a rambling complaint about repeated the use of the word pedophile on one of the vampires. One of the bit characters, Miranda, is a fifteen-year-old psychic who is being abused by a vampire named Charles, and he's repeatedly referred to as a pedophile by various other characters. This is a hypocritical moral judgement, especially considering other events in the previous books. It's okay to the townspeople that the vampires eat some of the college students as "surplus stock," and the human males who use roofies to date rape college girls are just let off with warnings multiple times like it's no big deal. But a vampire preying on someone under the age of eighteen is somehow morally reprehensible? Seriously?

At one point, Claire does get around to thinking how Miranda became a victim because everyone pushed her away. They're uncomfortable with her visions and shun her, but almost nobody bears any responsibility for her. With no one to protect her in a town full of predators, it isn't that surprising that she would fall into the clutches of anyone willing to treat her with some small sign of affection. Miranda is alone because the other people don't want to see the truth, and once she's been made a victim by way of their neglect, suddenly all those people who turned away feel justified in their moral outrage. Even Eve falls into this mental trap, and she was supposedly one of Miranda's friends before pushing her away, too.

More than that, it's a hollow sentiment, a false morality that doesn't fit with the tone of the town. Parents beating their kids in this town is okay and is swept under the rug. The cops actively cover up murders for the vampires, and the college campus is a factory for date rapists. But somehow, this one vampire is supposedly more evil because he isn't willing to wait three years to sink his fangs into virgin flesh? Yeah....no, I'm not feeling that.

I'd want to say this is a carefully crafted comment about the hypocrisy of the characters casually dropping the word pedophile, but then there's the relationship between Shane and Claire. Shane's an impulsive character, one prone to make rash and rushed decisions on everything except Claire, and then suddenly he goes all white knight and won't have sex with her despite her repeatedly asking him for it. The discussions that come up around this subplot, in particular with Eve, feel like the characters are being pushed out of the way for an adult lecture on abstinence. I know, it's a staple of YA to enshrine female virginity as all-important, but again, in this town, in this setting, it feels a lot like the author stepping into the story to deliver a lecture that feels forced every single time.

This is something that's bugged me about several of the books, but I think for further reviews, I'll just let it go. Whether the author intended to make a point or not about the hypocrisy of her characters, the use of this one word rubs me the wrong way because of how readily people in this town accept other equally terrible crimes, Claire and her friends included. It doesn't feel like a commentary on their flawed morals, but instead feels like a nestled lecture hidden among all the other crimes that don't receive this much attention.

But okay, setting that aside, the rest of the book was all about this looming war between the vampires, and the story cliff-hangs on the opening attack and puts Claire and her friends in the middle of the two armies. It's a grim setup for the next book, and the rising intensity made it impossible not to buy the next book in the series just minutes after I finished reviewing the last book. I didn't even bother writing up a review on this book before I'd bought the next and dug into it. I feel like I need to know how this story unfolds, and I can't even wait a day to get back into the story. So, setting aside my rambly complaints about a recurring subplot, I have to say this series is hitting all the right buttons to keep me hooked in.

I give Feast of Fools four stars, and I cannot recommend this series highly enough without resorting to novella-length tomes of gushing.