The Trials of Empire

This book brings The Empire of the Wolf trilogy to an end. I really enjoyed the first two books of this series, they both mixed medieval epic fantasy with mystery and a bit of horror. It was a great mix to me. Unfortunately, I think Trials of Empire did not live up to these first two installments for several reasons.

Trials of Empire simply tries to do too much with too little time. This third book tries to scale upwards at a staggering rate; we are no longer following a few people trying to stop a conspiracy to change the empire, now we are dealing with ancient, eldritch cosmic beings with insane scope and power. It's not undoable, and it's not as if it fails utterly, but it ramps up so steeply that I was left with whiplash. In the shuffle of all this, the characters and their internal dilemma's are largely lost in the shuffle. True, Helena does have a few terse conversations with Vonvalt and co, but mostly, they all spend this book reacting to insane shit happening and who can blame them?

A similar issue adding on is how much is not set up well or at all in the first two books that is now very important. A major element set up in the first two is almost not a factor in this book, and a character that plays a large-ish role in the second book randomly shows up in a chapter of this one out of nowhere, monologues for a few pages, and is then gone. Instead, we get several factions that hitherto were not mentioned. About halfway through the book, we get a giant exposition dump about the afterlife- the place where, until now, we have been dipping into, with some of my favorite scenes in the series. We are told about various factions and hierarchies and who the Big Bad of the series is, who hasn't been mentioned until this point. And then the rest of the novel is about assembling these factions together to beat the hierarchies and Big Bad from the afterlife and the final battle is filled with elements I didn't get enough time with to fully comprehend what I was reading. So my eyes just glazed over. Demons, eldritch, wolf people,blah blah. We also spend way too much time in visions and dreams - including in the big battle! It was an element that felt overdone for what it actually brought to the novel.

I don't feel like the central conflict between the two main characters is resolved in a great way, it's mostly handwaved. I do think the very end is good, and as always, the writing is good. I think this series needed a little less, or more books.