The long awaited final part of trilogy was finally released earlier this year. here's my handsome GBP black edition, although I am tempted to buy the set in hardback too since they have beautifully illustrated covers.
I'm every glad the first thing in this book is a summary of the first two as this would have been impossible to understand in places.
In this book, we pick up on the tale of Nathan Treeves, now taking his place as Master of Waterblack, the third city of the Weft. We also catch up on his assorted friends, the ghosts of the two magical dogs, and an assassin who we've met briefly in the past, but whose backstory takes up nearly the first half of the book at least.
There is the usual luscious prose that I've come to expect from Alex Pheby, and the imagination on display is immense. However this is the least satisfying of the trilogy.
There are pros and cons to characters who are basically gods and can do anything. On the one hand, it means there are no limits to what they can do. The imagination can fly anywhere. On the other hand, there are no limits on what they can do. It means the stakes seem trivial. Death becomes immaterial. Time and space, causality and all that wibbly wobbly stuff don't seem to matter any more.
This book does seem to fall victim to that. Plus, there seems to be less story and more musing and asking questions directly to the reader than there was in the other volumes. The 60 page interlude with the ghost dogs was particularly flawed. I found myself skim reading a couple of the appendices for similar reasons.
I'd love to say that this was a magnificent conclusion to the series but I will have to stop short of that. It's still a very good book indeed, Once everything hits the fan in the closing stages of the book (prior to the appendices) it's almost unputdownable. The section with Sharli's backstory was similarly brilliant. There are just a couple of lulls in the narrative, where style rules over substance and that's a real shame.