Slip In the Shadows

It's time for an update the Night Angel trilogy, whose first book I mentioned a couple weeks back. I recently finished the second book, Shadow's Edge. It was another mostly enjoyable book that still showed a lot of the same good qualities I liked in the first installment.

I'm still interested in most of the characters. In addition, one or two new faces arrived on the scene, and were generally written well. Also, author Brent Weeks continues to put his prose together in interesting ways, with potent images that convey a strong sense of place.

But his plotting became really erratic in this middle volume. The majority of the first 200 pages in this 650 book were a rather ineffectively realized attempt at a love story. Our anti-hero, the assassin of the first book, tries to give up that life to be with a woman he loves, and all momentum in the story stalls. Weeks is far less effective in writing of a domestic life than he is writing about the horrors of war and death. And the woman that is the object of the protagonist's affections is arguably the weakest character in the book.

Finally, though, things do pick up again, and then continue to accelerate to a rather unbelievable pace. And then you learn the rather odd reason why -- nearly all of the events that you might expect to conclude the entire trilogy actually come at the end of this second book. I found myself thinking about the final season of Babylon 5, a disappointing epilogue to a story that had really peaked in the fourth season.

I really wonder just what can really be in the third book. Oh, there are a few minor threads still unresolved or hinted at in the final chapters of book two, but nothing that seems like it couldn't be resolved in a fairly short space of time (and chapters). The truly major dramatic questions of the story feel already answered for me at this point.

But between a rough beginning and an unexpected and perhaps somewhat confusing ending were several hundred pages I ultimately enjoyed just as much as the first book of the series. It's just a slight dip overall, and I'd accordingly rate this middle volume a B-. That's certainly good enough to keep me reading -- especially fueled by my curiosity to see just what's left that could not only fill another book, but what by spine thickness appears to actually be the biggest book of the three.