Knight's Shadow

Ah, Falcio, Falcio, Falcio; sometimes you are a bit of a great big dumb-dumb.

As this book was significantly longer than the first I was expecting it to take longer to read but somehow it was just as easy to make progress with and went by quite quickly for 600 pages. Compared to the first book there was also a lot that was very similar and Falcio seems to be somehow both clever and utterly oblivious all at once, which did start to grate on me a little in this installment.

How is he so intuitive in battle and negotiations and putting all the pieces of the puzzle together to see the picture no one else can and yet still never figure out who is behind the grand machinations that are sweeping Tristia? I guessed both “big reveals” of who was behind the two different forms of atrocities fairly early on and found myself getting more and more frustrated by Falcio's dumbest genius routine. This happened in the first book too but as that was a lot shorter it didn't impact my overall enjoyment quite so much; in this book I found myself getting a bit bored of Falcio's selective stupidity.

Oh, and can we stop calling every woman in the book a ‘whore'? I mean, c'mon! Use your imaginations, boys & girls.

DESPITE the drawbacks above, I still enjoyed the story overall though it feels very compact. I will continue with the series to Saint's Blood and I'm curious to see if any of my other predictions will come true.