First Lord's Fury

Executive Summary: A mostly satisfying conclusion to an enjoyable series.

Audio book: Another enjoyable performance by Kate Reading. She really adds that extra something I hope to get from every audio book performance.

Full Review
This series is a lot of fun. My main complaint on my first read still holds true on the reread. I just don't care about the Vord. I enjoy the internal politics of the Alerans. I love the differences of the Alerans to the Marat, Canim and Ice Men.

The battles and interactions with those races seems far superior to the stuff with the Vord. The previous 5 books the Vord while important are more of a setting rather than a large player. A looming threat as it were. In this book unfortunately, they feature way too much for my liking. The scenes where the Vord Queen is talking just felt to go on too long.

That said, I ended up enjoying this book more on my reread than I did the first time. As I said, it's a lot of fun. If you're looking for something deep or complex you'll be disappointed. On the other hand if you want some great characters, a pretty cool magic system, and some really excellent action scenes you'll find plenty of that here.

While Tavi is clearly the main protagonist one could also argue that it's just as much Amara's story as well. It's her POV that opens the series and she plays almost as significant a role in the events of the series as Tavi himself. So it's no surprise that she plays an important role here.

In a genre overrun by male characters, it's a nice change of pace. I can't speak to the accuracy of her as a woman, but she's certainly not your stereotypical female character whose only job is to seduce or annoy the male characters. Some of her stories/scenes got a little slow for me in places, but when they were good I was just as excited to get back to her as I was for Tavi.

Overall I think this is a pretty good conclusion to a pretty good series that will probably always be overshadowed by Mr. Butcher's more popular Dresden Files. Most things are wrapped up pretty well, but I'd love to get a sequel book/series where we catch up to how things play out 20 or 50 years down the road.