Into a Dark Realm

A fan of Feist's setting and world imagination will absolutely love the stuff being introduced and painted here, expanding far beyond Midkemia and Kelewan.

To start with a rant though, some of the bad things from the previous book carried over. Repetitive descriptions of a character's trait or behaviour, as if I need to be explicitly reminded of it every few chapters. Same thing with the proofreading - primarily towards the end - with obvious grammatical mistakes and missing words.

Still, ignoring that, the plot did not fail to be engaging. It was great seeing new characters. Too bad the existing cast didn't get much development, just what happened to them. Despite placing most of them in supposedly dangerous situations, I can't really get any feeling of suspense; none of them appear to be in any danger. And all those “things that are happening”, is really the essence of the book - setting things up until the third book. This was nailed in with the book having no real finale to it.

The pace of all the plot lines are good, and keeps me reading. Each chapter jumps around several plot lines though, perhaps a little too often - not enough to throw me off, but just noticeably frequent.

Overall, I enjoyed this book. It's better than the first book and the previous trilogy in terms of being engaging. Not very much better, but better nevertheless.