To be perfectly honest, I didn’t really have that high expectations of this after the other two books in the series, but I think it may have been my favourite of them. Despite a huge eye-roll at the way the last book ended, this one picks it up and runs with it. Séverin appeared to betray his friends and ran away with Ruslan, the patriarch of the Fallen House to become a god, but he left a secret message with Laila, which she immediately destroyed after waking up, in a fit of pique. So now his friends don’t have the clues he left them.
Of course, they figure it out anyway and the story is mostly Séverin trying to redeem himself against the anger of Laila and Enrique; Hypnos was all too willing to forgive, and Zofia understands what he was trying to do. So after the gang gets back together Séverin spends most of the time (when he’s not smugly solving mysteries) making big puppy dog eyes at the others.
The big bad didn’t really feel all that much of a threat, the main plot driver was the quest to find the maguffin (it’s no less a maguffin for being a location rather than an object). There’s some great sequences en route (I think the big wall on the island, after the lake was my favourite) but it didn’t really feel to me that the characters got that much development. Poor Hypnos, once again, gets hardly any time in his head (although he did get at least one PoV chapter this time) despite being one of the more interesting of the group. Laila is mostly just angry and brooding, and a driver of the plot rather than an active participant. As usual, Zofia and Enrique were great fun (is anyone else getting a bit of a Parker and Hardison from Leverage vibe from them?), although there was no single moment as great as Zofia on the glass stag from the last book.
The ending was interesting and somewhat unexpected. Other reviewers didn’t like it at all, but I didn’t actually mind it too much. It definitely had more melancholy than I was expecting, but still, a good conclusion to the series. I don’t think it’s one I’ll reread but I don’t regret my time spent with it, and it went out on a high.
