Dawn of Night

The plot continues immediately after the somewhat-cliffhanger ending in book 1, where we find out how they managed to survive.

Book 2 continues along the lines of delving into Cale's and Riven's transformation into Mask's Chosen. I cannot help but wonder what exactly is Mask's interest in the main plot. Thievery I suppose? There's some character development for each of the four protagonists, but their motivation for the main plot feels somewhat weak. Being anti-heroes (except for Jak I suppose), they really needed a stronger motivation - this was present in book 1 - to explain why they're so doggedly going after villains. I really enjoyed the lore and flavour in this book, this time the Plane of Shadow, and later Skullport.

The main plot moves along pretty quickly so the pace never gets slow. I kind of like the flow. Also, being able to read from the villain's POVs is nice, seeing things from their side and presenting their motivations. Too bad that I found the revealed plot to be a bit unbelievable though, unbelievable in the sense that it's being done in so much secrecy so successfully. It's really unbelievable that Mystra would be ignoring all the power spikes in the Weave. Shar for her Shadow Weave, I can understand, since she wants annihilation anyway, but Msytra and her Chosen? It doesn't really make sense. And with Skullport being watched by the Lords of Waterdeep as well, it's just highly unlikely, to me, that Khelben and Laeral would fail to get involved.The finale was a mixed bag - the good is that there was a totally unexpected twist for me, that and the fact of where it's taking place is really juicy, spicing things up for the next book. The bad was yet another cliffhanger, another very-similar-to-book-one-ending cliffhanger. I found that a bit... lame, maybe? Well, here's to book 3 ramping and wrapping things up, it's a bit of a downer since I found book 1 rather exciting.