The second book in the series, an excellent continuation from the first. He doesn’t make the mistake of expanding the points of view too greatly.
Long story short: if you liked the first book, the series gets better. The hard work of figuring out the overall situation is over– now you get to see how everyone deals with tough circumstances. Some of it is surprising– very surprising.
A pretty good book, filled with intrigue. It was almost set aside; the prologue felt very fan-fic, with a super heroic character, cut off from everything, overcoming outrageous odds and completely manipulative and dispassionate. Fortunately I stuck it out and got much more appealing characters in the next several chapters.
The book has the struggle intrigue rich books always suffer; there’s a complex set of interactions and history that the major players all know, but the reader has to get introduced to them as transparently as possible. The author does a good job of not info dumping intensely, though separating the dreams and history from the book’s current day is tricky the first time it comes up.
In the end, I liked the characters– they are all flawed, but most have extenuating (or at least explanatory) circumstances. The nebulous evil is very shadowy– we only come to certain proof at mid-book (from a minor character’s POV, and at the end (for the movers and shakers).
The book doesn’t even pretend to come to a real conclusion; it ends on a turning point, but there’s no clear break or circumstance to ground it. Despite my grousing, I do want to look up the other books in the series and see where the characters wind up. The end of the world’s a good place for drama…