I’m taking a page from Jay’s book and re-running some old reviews from my now-defunct personal review blog. For the most part they are unchanged in content, except for removing things that no longer apply and actual editorial scouring…no, not even my prose is immune. 
This third and final novel of the Nine Kingdoms trilogy was closer in style to the first than the second. It had more action propelling the story forward and less character development, since all the characters who needed to come to terms with who they are had taken care of that in the second book.
There was a pretty specific list of wrap-ups that had to happen: the correct spell for closing the well of evil had to be found, then they had to reforge the magic sword Morgan broke at the end of the first book, then they had to go close the well, and then they had to fight the most evil putz of a sorcerer of all time–you know, the one the ancestors didn’t kill when they had the chance. And that’s what happened, along with some other minor happenings that it would spoil the surprise to talk about.
I was a bit surprised at the timing of some of the events. I supposed (for no good reason, really) that the reforging of the sword would be a big deal or take a big quest to get there. Nah. Just a chapter. I think it was a case where the author is, again, more of a romance writer than a fantasy writer, in two senses of that distinction. First, she wasn’t interested in sending them off on trumped-up, stretched-out-needlessly quests the way a lot of epic fantasy writers like to do. And second, she was more interested in giving the characters ample time to talk about how much they loved each other in a few key places, so if she had a 400-page limit then she only had so much room for adventuring, anyway, and she was saving it for the moments that really mattered. It was a nice sense of timing, actually. It covered what needed to be covered, left time for an extended denouement, and didn’t really waste time with irrelevencies (at least, irrelevent pieces of action).
The one beef I have with the end (this is a spoiler, but, come on, did you really think it wasn’t going to be a happy ending?) is that they, again, didn’t kill the evil sorcerer. If the hero(es) was/were totally opposed to killing, that would be one thing. But, I’m sorry, when you’ve been killing people for 2 days in battle and you have in hand the man who kidnapped and tortured you as a young man, killed your parents, almost killed the woman you love (who is not a pacificist opposed to killing, by the way, so you can’t claim it’s so she won’t stop loving you), just killed your brother, and was all around the most evil bastard pretty much ever, it is unrealistic to not kill him. It’s the fucking Batman not dropping the Joker off the building when he had the chance in The Dark Knight thing–the author can’t bear to have her hero kill someone while he’s “helpless” so he doesn’t. Leaves it to the next generation AGAIN. It doesn’t make any sense, not from a moralistic point of view (since none of the characters were opposed to killing) nor from a practical point of view (because it made no sense to not kill him). The closest thing I heard to an argument against killing him from one of the characters was that one of his sons will just take over…um, seems to me that if he’s imprisoned and effectively removed from power that one of his sons will be taking over the family business of mayhem and destruction ANYWAY. I suppose there is also the matter of needing him alive to reverse a spell against one of the family members, but that argument seems to me too great a risk for the risk/reward ratio, and thus the compassion Miach shows to the enemy was, to me, kind of a lame piece of moralizing on the part of the author there at the end.
Otherwise, events wrapped up as they were supposed to (and I can’t say the above aspect of the end really surprised me). Overall, a good yarn for a long winter night…and one that needs to be taken that way, both for its tone and its content.
