With the fourth and final book of Greg Keyes’ Kingdom of Thorn and Bone quartet, the shark got well and completely jumped. I mean, there were hints in the third book, The Blood Knight, but in this one, Fonzie put on a pair of rocket propelled water skies and leaped across a flooded Grand Canyon filled with prehistoric sharks and Dick Cheney.

The first two book established an interesting, if not terribly original world. But as the third one hurtled to its conclusion, you could see things unraveling.

This one suddenly had plot twists that were completely unforeshadowed and not in a cool, ‘I didn’t see that coming way,’ but in a ‘wait, so everyone and everything in the last three hundred pages is now the exact opposite of what they were in the first thousand pages?’ Insufficiently explained deus ex machina, magical fights that were poorly described and confusing. And I don’t even really know what exactly a whole bunch of major (in the sense of having taken up a lot of total page space) characters did to contribute to the final… victory?