The Tower Broken

Pros: lots of intrigue, complex story, satisfying series ending, great characters

Cons: climax felt rushed, Adam's motivations at the end were puzzling

Picking up a few months after the events of The Knife Sworn, things are not well in the capital of Cerana. With General Arigu missing Sarmin doesn't have the full confidence of his army; the High Priest of Herzu is pressuring him to make sacrifices to appease the Gods; Sarmin's brother is still missing; Mogyrk rebels are loose in the city, setting fires and killing guards; and the Storm, a vast emptiness that swallows all in its path, is almost at the city gates.

Sarmin is forced to make difficult choices to maintain his authority while dealing with numerous threats from both within and without his Empire. A surviver of a Mogyrk pattern attack is kidnapped by Austere Adam because he's able to read the symbols used in pattern magic. The mages find a crack growing on one of the Tower's walls. And the Yrkmir army marches on Nooria.

As the conclusion to the Tower and Knife trilogy this book has a lot to accomplish. There are so many things going on and numerous view points to see the action from. Mazarkis does a fantastic job of keeping a coherent narrative, focusing on the essentials while ensuring a feeling of the scale of the Empire and the wide ranging consequences of everyone's decisions. Each of the major players felt like a complete individual with their own motivations for their actions.

There's a huge amount of building up to the climax, and the climax as a consequence felt rushed. Indeed, I wondered at one point, if maybe there was a 4th book to the series, as it didn't seem possible to wrap everything up in time. But Mazarkis did manage to deal with all the major plot threads, and in a satisfying way.

Having said that, I found Austere Adam's motivations in the final few chapters of the book somewhat puzzling.

There were some minor things that irritated me about the book, the occasional unnecessary repetition, characters doing something odd in one scene, but on the whole I loved this series and highly recommend it.