By the standards of this series The Devil’s Feast actually ended...
reasonably positively?
I mean Blake’s either got to go back to prison, flee to America or somewhere else well away from Avery or suck up to a man he despises who is also the one who falsely put him in prison but
Blake and Avery were still together at the point it ended. Usually the author loves to rip them apart and emphasise how Blake is essentially alone and abandoned.
I’m not going to say I totally LOVED it though despite that. Cos it took well over 100 pages before Blake actually showed up in a proper role and even then he spent most of the time in hiding/asleep/pretending to be someone else, meaning Avery was the one who had to carry most of the plot even then. And no offence Avery but Blake is the one who needs to carry most of the story, and they need far more proper interaction than they seemed to have here. Then Avery’s wife showed up totally pointlessly (seriously she’s a totally pointless annoying character who clearly is not in love with her husband any more than he’s in love with her, who doesn’t seem to care much at all about their child either and has no real personality, I have no idea why the author bothered to even create her or bring her into it again) which put further distance between Blake and Avery which is not a good thing when these are called the Blake and Avery mysteries not the ‘Avery attempts to investigate and Blake eventually appears and tells him what to do when he’s not too ill and then Avery’s pointless wife butts in’ series.
And I felt maybe the resolution to the mystery part seemed rushed after Avery (and eventually Blake) spent so long trying to work it out.
I liked it a lot still but it just needed more, you know, actual Blake and Avery.