David Sven's Reviews > Beyond the Shadows

This book continues right on from book two. After Logan Gyres initial victory over the God King, Garoth Ursuul, and the Khalidorian Empire, he is left to deal with the surrounding nations closing in to stake their own claim on Cenaria. To make things worse the Vurdmeisters and remaining Ursuuls fight to reinstate themselves as the new god king. To this end some attempt to raise an army of creatures from the other side. Some are even desperate enough to try to raise the goddess Khali herself, willing to risk the enslavement of all humanity to the desire of a hateful entity from beyond.

I had a hard time connecting to the plot with this one. In the first book we saw the rise of The Night Angel. In the second book we saw The Night Angel doing it's job of dispensing justice, when the book finally got going in the second half, and then closing with the confrontation with the god king. Good. But this book the plot just seemed to be all over the place. In the third book of a trilogy I'm generally expecting all the diverging plot lines from the previous books begin to converge to a climactic resolution. Instead we get even more story arcs diverging from left field before finally coming together. For example the stories of the three mages, Dorian, Solon and Feir. While I was looking forward to learning more about them, where they end up made it seem like their whole arcs just gets started in this book, making their story very top heavy.

Worse was that Kyler's role as The Night Angel seemed to lose its way somewhat. Instead of dispensing justice and mercy he's off having confused sex with one and half women and then plays a role that is more like warrior mage than the lone wolf icon of justice and mercy. The rules of what he is supposed to be or do just seemed to be too flexible. And the ending was just a little to convenient and vague to me. The "good" love based magic won over the evil "vir" magic. Hmmm.

I still enjoyed reading the book, while I was reading it, but whenever I picked the book up I had to really think to remember what was supposed to be happening and why, which led to some continuity problems. A reread might make things clearer - but maybe not.

I enjoyed book one the most out of the three. Book two was good, even more polished than book one even though I still enjoyed book one more. This book was just too all over the place to enjoy as much.

I can't help but think back on Brent Week's Lightbringer books which I read before these. They show a vast improvement in plot structure and magic system and pacing. Weeks has definitely got better since Night Angel and if you enjoyed this series then I think his next series will be a pleasant surprise starting with The Black Prism.

But for this book it's...


3 stars (4 stars avg for the series)